Time Flies....

Can't seem to catch up these days!  The end of summer is always busy but this year, summers end was rather abrupt!  It went from warm and sunny to cold and cloudy with a whole week of rain!  Very unusual for us.

We did get a major project done that we have been working toward and saving money for for at least 4 years and that is the house painting!!  After many ideas I finally settled on simple and we painted it white with black trim.  Here are the before and afters:

Before - peeling and flaking a pale yellow and light blue....

After - I think it looks cleaner as well.

and my purple door!!

The before on the back porch...

and after.

White vinyl lattice work to replace the broken wood ones.  Had to have a cat door, it is their 'safe space'!







We are very pleased with the look and the fact that the house is sealed now as they caulked and repaired the spots that needed it.  Should help with the winter weather to keep it warmer.

We took a trip to Hell's Canyon for our Anniversary (37 years).  It is the deepest gorge in North America, the Snake river runs through it, and it is part of the border between Oregon and Idaho in the south and Washington and Idaho in the north.  It was a beautiful day and a fun trip, we rode on a bus with the Parks and Rec group and then took a Jet boat ride up the canyon.

We pulled into a cove on the Idaho side and they turned the big diesel engines off so we could hear the river ...

 The view on the Oregon side!

Class 4 rapids with a 14 foot overall drop!  We've had so much water this year that it is like spring runoff season in the fall - very unusual.








Youngest son came up to visit and for my birthday, he took the bus to Winnemucca Nevada and my friend Anita and I drove the 4 hours to pick him up, stay overnight and bring him home the next day.  We wanted to see new stuff as we have driven this road every time we go to California.  So we stopped at the Charbonneau grave site....

 Son of Sacajawea from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Beautiful sky, and lovely but lonely scenery.  This is along the southern route for the Oregon Trail and it is interesting I think, to look and see what the pioneers must have seen and wonder what they thought.

This is cattle ranching country, wide open spaces.

The old Stage station was here which we did not expect - kind of a bonus!

Then we drove a little further to a little town called Rome, Oregon.  (town is really stretching it, I think there are 5 buildings)

The pioneers thought these rock formations looked like old Roman walled fortresses from a distance, so they called them the  "Pillars of Rome", which is how the little town got it's name.

Kind of amazing, I think.  But perhaps the most amazing thing was that we kept seeing these green boxes that looked like cable TV boxes.  We stopped to look and they said "fiber optic cable" buried here!  Seriously the true middle of nowhere has better internet service than we do!!


So we have been rather busy - and a fun time was had by all!!