Clear Lake

Off to a rocky start. . . but ended just perfectly. This is not the way anyone would want to start out on a 5 day camping adventure, get to the place and they inform you that they have given away your site! Apparently it is a new rule that if you do not occupy your site in the first 24hours, even if you have paid the entire balance prior that they are allowed to give your site away. So we headed off on Friday to Timothy Lake for a camping trip we had been planning for 9 months to the day. This is one of our favorite trips of the year and we were REALLY excited to be finally going. Imagine our surprise, after a long drive and many unexpected stops (including an overheating car), with two grumpy children when we pulled up and then informed us that they had given away both sites we had reserved!! Well after a lot of, we'll just call it "huffing and puffing", we (Michael) finally decided we were just going home. I couldn't imagine canning the whole trip, after all, here we are with all of our stuff and we have 5 days off to camp. So on our way home I talked him into just at least stopping at one of the places along the road and "seeing" if they had any sites we could camp at. . . . . long story short, we were able to camp in the overflow camp at Clear Lake. It really turned out to be a wonderful camping experience, aside from the lack of fish in the lake. Nana and Papa, Nick and Corinna were able to join us there and we really had a great time, actually, we would really like to go back sometime soon.

Here are some pictures of our trip. My niece Quinn was able to come up with Nana and Papa to spend the weekend with us too.




Kaden LOVED the boat. He really didn't care to swim but could ride around all day in the boat.

That is our site behind Nick and Corinna. We were really close to the water, it was such a beautiful view.

Quinn and Makayla swam all the way across the lake!!! Of course they had their life jackets on and they were with Nana and Michael, but that was still a very long way!!

Oxbow Park

We have done two camping trips in 1 week. I really like it, but at some point we have to come back to reality. Last weekend we met Josh and Jodi at the coast and then we came home for a 1 day break and then we were off to Oxbow Park. Oxbow is first come first serve campground so my sister Sarah and I went up early with the kids to save spots and the rest of the crew came up the next day. We had a big group and actually used 5 sites. We were able to get all of them right next to eachother which was really cool.

Visit from afar

We were able to hook up with our close friends (ok, their like family), Josh and Jodi when they came through Oregon on their month long road trip/vacation. Since we have a full house we chose to meet up at the coast and do some camping.



We chose to go to Nehalem Bay, we had heard so many good things but had never gone ourselves. It was about 85 degrees in Newberg when we left, but typical Oregon Coast weather it was cold and windy at the coast.

We had already had one day of cold/windy weather so on the second day after it had rained on us for a while, we decided to head to Canon Beach to grab lunch. We retreated to Mo's so that Josh could have Clam Chowder in a bread bowl. :o)

After lunch the weather seemed to have cleared up a bit so we headed to Oswald State Park. It is so pretty there! We took a little hike into the cove and spent some time just playing on the beach. The tide was in to see the tide pools but we did see some sea life and found a couple hermit crabs.

I LOVE this picture (below)

The kids finally talked Jodi into a game of Don't Break the Ice.