Mother's Day Weekend

We started the weekend with Amy & I going to the Cascades Cars & Coffee gathering at a shopping center between our motel and PDX. Too many new zoom zooms and too little classic for our taste.

Later in the morning we took the twins (in stroller) to the Portland Farmer's Market. This downtown event is held in a large city park centered in the University campus. It runs from about 8am to about 2pm, and really draws shoppers.

Already downtown, we decided to visit the Japanese Garden and Rose Garden. We were about 3 weeks too early for roses, but right on for the rhodadendrum, azalea and misc. blooming trees. The twins mostly slept while the adults went ohh & ahh.

The Twins, and other guests

Saturday our family friend Andy Marshall, along with wife Stephanie and 11 month old daughter Simone, visited from Seattle. Made for a really crowded, but happy, house. We are spending about 10 hours a day at the house helping out as best we can. That may change as the week progresses. This will be the last blog post for a few days...probably Mother's Day weekend with Amy & Todd here for the next one.

Day 16 and the 1st half is done

Off from Kennewick following the Columbia. Stayed on the WA side of the river on WA14 rather the OR side and I-84. Left Kennewick with about 3/8 of a tank of gas and no realization how far it would be until we found another station. The dash display said we had 9 miles left in the tank when we came to a bridge across to OR and gas stations. Amy would have been distraught!!! Back to the WA side and a picnic lunch at the Maryhill Museum  http://www.maryhillmuseum.org/ . We visited here in October 2011 when we first came to see the twins. It was nice to see green landscapes compared to the brown last fall. This trip down the Columbia Gorge is especially pretty. Arrived Portland about 4pm, checked in and unloaded the car, went to Courtney/Fred's for a pizza dinner end to the trip. We logged 4,680 miles over the 16 days...and spent about $900. on gas. The 4-runner got an average of 20.5 mpg for the trip, which considering the constant headwinds and roof carrier is better than originally expected.