Home Again...

I guess I have waited long enough to update. I have been home for 5 days now, and was trying to not blog until my house got back in order, but that may never happen! 6 weeks away makes for a lot of catch-up work later!

I can't complain though. The kids and I had a wonderful time visiting family and enjoying the 'milder' weather in Utah. We were very excited to have Jake come up and join us on our week long trip to Oregon, as we all missed him incredibly.

We drove a lot, stayed at a different hotel every night, and saw some of the most amazing scenery I have ever seen! To say I took a lot of photos would be an understatement. I went a little camera crazy on this trip! I seriously had my head stuck out of the car window snapping photos most of the drive.

This is a small portion of my photos that Jake put in a set for me. I believe that it only covers 4 or 5 days on the coast. You can click here if you want to see a sampling of the places we explored.

I was able to get in a couple of runs while we were away, and one morning I found this cool 'floating' home neighborhood. I just loved the style of these houses and the idea of living on a river. These homes are on the Columbia Gorge River, just outside of downtown Portland...This is a cute little park overlooking the river. My kids were excited to go to a park and just play and swing. They got to spend quite a bit of time at the beach one day, but most of the time we were in the car or walking around. This night was a good break for them and us!Does anyone recognize this beach? This is Cannon Beach and it is where Goonies was filmed. All of us were excited to stay in Astoria and see this familiar view. We had to geek out on the radios by saying every funny line we could remember from the movie. I have to say, I think we said them all...and yes, we are a little nerdy!

I would love to go back and spend a couple more days exploring some of the coastal towns that we passed through. There was just so much to see and it would've added too much more time on our trip.

Well, that's most of the pictures of ONE of our weeks away. I guess I only have 5 more weeks of lost time to catch up on! It was so great to see many of you on our vacation, and we feel very lucky to have such great friends and family out there! Thanks for making it a memorable summer for us!