Willamette Valley, Oregon

So, today we left Corvallis and headed over to Lebanon, which is a small town about 8 miles to the east of the I-5 freeway, opposite the exit to Corvallis. My cousin's Daughter, Sarah, bless her heart, drove from her home to bring us 3 packages of elk 'burger' and some elk steaks. They got their elk on a recent hunting trip to Idaho. It was wonderful of her to share with us. What a sweetie.

Bill wanted to go to this model railroad swap meet in Lebanon so that's whey we went there. It turned out to be quite small and it didn't take but 15 minutes to see everything and then we took a back road back to the freeway, which brought us to the town of Albany. But it also afforded some lovely views of the beautiful Willamette Valley. This is why (well one strong reason, anyway) those brave pioneers came out on the Oregon Trail (1842-1869). This rich valley provided a wonderful place to settle and to grow their crops. Of course the native population already knew this was a great place, but...well....that's the story of the American expansion, whether we like it or not.

We had a nice visit. We will go back soon to see them. I worry about them, of course. A few photos of our trip can be seen on my Flickr page.

There was a major wind storm on Thursday afternoon, which didn't seem to effect us much at my folks's place....but we were curious what had happened in our neighborhood and home. A few people had some fencing problems, one neighbor lost a small tree and he was cutting it up when we drove in, another man was fixing some shingles, and we had our patio table knocked over and the umbrella looks like it's bent. A branch which held the suet feeder is no longer on the tree, but blown into the shrubs in the wooded lot behind our house. Must have been exciting around here for a few hours. I love storms...and I missed out on this one. Rats.