Summer! We've had a couple of brutal heatwaves, a charmingly tiny canine houseguest who adores Skipper, some ultimate frisbee, and a trip to Seattle to see family and watch baseball. We finally get to moved back into our house (after exactly the kind of exhausting, overbudget, much-drawn-out renovation project that makes people tell you never to do a renovation).
Duchess had an early-summer trip to Sweden that she enjoyed enormously- it's hard not to be won over by Sweden at midsummer, and Duchess got three weeks of endless daylight, wild strawberries, swimming, weird lawn games, and excellent public transportation. Plus a million mosquito bites, but you can't win everything.
We took a road trip to eastern Oregon! We started off with a minor league baseball game in Washington.
Then we went south to Wallowa Lake to camp for a couple of nights, just as severe thunderstorms settled in the area.
We stopped to pay our respects to the confluence of the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Cook loves a confluence.
We also stopped for Dutch Bros, a great Oregon cultural tradition that Cook does not find appealing, being a black-coffee-acquired-cheaply-and-on-foot guy, so he insisted that we park and walk up to the window instead of driving through.
Wallowa Lake is beautiful when it isn't pouring rain.
Our activities were curtailed by the intermittent lightning and downpours, and by Duchess's stress fracture (preventing her from walking far), so we visited downtown Joseph and downtown Enterprise.
Cook and the girls bravely swam in the lake. I'm given to understand it was quite cold.
We splurged and took a tram up to the top of a mountain. Duchess was not a fan of the tram, but Skipper really was.
We drove to Baker City, stopping in Lostine for coffee along the way, and then Lagrande to visit another bookstore.
Took a day in Baker City, visited the Oregon Trail wagonruts.
We drove to Bend, stopping for pie, ghost towns, and a very large wagon replica.
In Bend, we visited relatives and the Deschutes River.
And then we came home! Eastern Oregon is really, really beautiful, and we were also so glad to return home!
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