June brought us to Ohio for our son’s wedding.  As parents we would all like to be able to do the “picking” of our children’s spouse.  Joe and I are very fortunate.  We couldn’t have picked better for any of our kids.  Our son Zach moved to Ohio seven years ago at the age of 22 to take a job that his Uncle Art offered him.  I remember watching him drive out of our Jordan drive-way by himself, car packed with clothes and a few essentials for the 800 mile trip to Ohio. I thought "he'll be back". He moved in with his Uncle’s family for a few months before he found an apartment.  Joe and I then packed up a U-haul with all of his belongings and made the trip to OH…

I’ve been really having a hard time getting started writing about our California adventure.   It’s not that we haven’t been having a wonderful time in CA.  We have seen some beautiful areas.  I love CA’s beautiful trees and flowers.   One of the first things that we saw as we crossed the border from Oregon was the Giant Redwoods.  We went through the 31-mile scenic drive called the Avenue of the Giants of the Ancient Redwoods.  We spent time hiking in some of the groves and even got lost once when we got turned around on a trail.  We spent an anxious hour trying to find the trail that would take us back to the truck.  We also spent time hiking at Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve in Guerneville, CA.   Beautiful…

Today we lost one of our beloved four-legged family members to kidney disease.  It was a tough decision to make and one we always prayed wouldn’t come.  We’ve been very fortunate to have had almost 15 years of loyal companionship with Abby.  In her younger years she loved to play fetch with the ball in the back yard and would wear herself out trying to catch the light beam from a flashlight as we moved it across the floor.  She has been a great traveler and a trouper when it came to hikes until these last few years.  We made a huge mistake when we went back to Minnesota for the holidays.  After several visits to our own vet, being hospitalized and knowing she wasn’t going to fully recover, we…

We’ve been asked why we haven’t posted anything since the first part of November.  Not sure other than leaving Oregon was sad and anticipating our trip back to Minnesota was all that was on our minds.  So I’m going to talk about Christmas back in Minnesota and come back to our adventures in California later. Joe and I could hardly wait to get back to our kids and grandbaby Cate in Minnesota.  We gave ourselves 5 days to make the 2052 mile trip back.  We were so fortunate.  The weather was perfect which made the roads perfect.  We left CA on Dec 16th and were in MN on Dec 20th.  We were so excited to hold our granddaughter but our dogs had other ideas.  Both ended up sick on the…

 We didn’t have to drive very far into Northeastern Oregon to start to see the beauty of the state. We had been told by so many fellow RVers that we were going to love Oregon. We could already see what they meant. It was beautiful. We still saw the farm land that we saw in Idaho but we also saw mountains and valleys.  We decided to go into the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest for our first few nights of camping in Oregon. We found this spectacular campground in the National Forest about 20 miles from Baker City called Union Creek. They were in the process of closing it for the winter so we were only able to stay for three nights. It was beautiful! All sites were surrounded by huge red…

 We spent eight days in Idaho. The country we drove through was almost all farm land so we saw a lot of cows and fields; potato, grain, corn, and sugar beet fields. Sometimes you can say that farm fields are a beautiful site especially in the fall but field after field got to be just a little tiresome.  We did visit a very nice park in the center of the city of Idaho Falls which was our first stop. We didn’t find the park until the day we were going to leave which was too bad. It had a very beautiful waterfalls and a walking/ bike path that ran along the Snake River which ran through the town.  Our next stop was at Twin Falls, Idaho. Here we stayed at…