Travel Log: The Wedding & Our First Long Day On the Road

Saturday was my step-brother, Dave's wedding. Man has he grown and matured! I'm really proud of him for the man he has become.

Congrats to both of you Dave and Jess. It was an honor to be a part of your wedding celebration!

Here are a few pics from the wedding day...

Saturday morning there was nothing else on the agenda, so I took my dad, Aunt Ruth, and ES out geocaching.

ES and Grandpa walking toward a geocache in the Deschutes National Forest.

Man he cleans up nice, doesn't he?

YB got a lot of compliments on his red Crocs. We even got his shirt to stay tucked in for most of the afternoon.

The cake was both beautiful and delicious.

The happy couple say their vows (photo by ES).

Sunset over the Cascades.

If you click on the sunset image above and look at the high-res version, you might notice a dozen or more black specks in the sky. Those black specks are actually bats! I had never actually seen them in a natural setting like that. It was neat to watch them all swooping around over the lake eating bugs.

YB Dancing on Uncle Jon's Shoulders

I took an awesome video of Uncle Jon flipping YB's collar up and showing him how to dance. I'll upload it to YouTube later, but it's late and I need to get to bed. I also need to find some time to scroll through the hundreds of pictures YB took with the camera to see if there are any gems worth sharing.

Today we survived our first day of driving all day long as we headed south. We stopped at Crater Lake National Park along the way. I had never been there before, and it was a spectacular thing to see. I rank the natural beauty of Crater Lake right up there with the Grand Canyon.


I used the panorama feature of my new camera to take this shot. The camera actually takes three pictures and then blends them together in the camera's memory. It's never perfect and usually easy to pick out the seams between pictures, but I still really liked how this one turned out.

Welcome to California!

Mt. Shasta

Every time we got out of the car and back into the car again, we had to repeat the SAME conversation with YB.

YB: Are we going to Virginia now?

Me: No, YB, it's going to take us 14 days to get to Virginia.

YB: Oh... Are we going to sleep in the car?

Me: No, YB, we're going to sleep in a hotel.

YB: Oh...

He clearly has no conception of what is in store for him. That being said, the boys were pretty good overall in the car today. They have plenty to keep them entertained between the DVD player, the Ninetendo DS's, the coloring books, the sticker books, the toys, etc, etc.

A few statistics from today:

8 Number of hours on the road (including stops for lunch, restrooms, site seeing)
1 Number of 1,943 foot deep lakes we saw
3 Number of choo-choo trains we saw
4 Number of extremely nasty gas station, rest stop, and restaurant bathrooms we had the pleasure of visiting.
387 Number of cows, horses, goats, sheep, and other animals we saw (okay, yeah, I made that one up.)