Zebras in Oregon?

Hi, remember me? Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Summer has been quite busy, with some work but lots of fun stuff too.

In early August we went to Family Camp. The actual time we spent at camp seemed to go by very quickly and the parts that stood out to me were making a dozen institutional-sized-baking-sheet pizzas on Saturday which would have been pure fun except it took pretty much my whole afternoon; and a good long chat with my friend EL.

The unusual and fun stuff happened on our way to camp and getting home.

Remember back to October when we dressed up for the Harvest Party? BN was a sock monkey and I was a princess. Well, we won a prize in the costume contest and it was a day pass to the Oregon Wildlife Safari. I don’t know how well known it is, but it’s this crazy drive-thru zoo with all kinds of real live African (and other) animals. We didn’t even have time to go through all of it, and it was the middle of a hot summer day so a lot of the animals we did see were settled firmly in the shade. Some llamas and ostriches came right up close to our car, though. The safari is pretty close to the camp, so we went on our way there and due to the confusing wording on our gift certificate, we got a day pass for a future visit. So maybe next time we’ll try to go on a cooler day for more active critters and better lighting for photos. The ones we did manage to get are posted here.

Before leaving the vicinity of camp, we made our usual stop at Colliding Rivers which is the coolest swimming hole ever. It’s like a natural water park. There are places to jump from cliffs into the water, places to jump into swirling rapids and travel downstream, and also an ideal riverboarding spot. We’d tried this last year with the intrepid LR and this year he had built a better board and the guys had already set up the log anchor the day before. This year I totally got up and had an awesome run. I even impressed myself. BN wowed the crowd by surfing no-hands. (It’s similar to wake-boarding or something like that but you are not being towed, just stationarily (new word) positioned on the swift, smooth current.) The water was fairly deep but you could see clear down to the pebbly surface. What a rush! It’s really a shame to not have a picture to show you but you have to swim to the spot and there’s not a good way to bring a camera.