A Busy Week of Travel: Eugene and Olympia

This post is a summary of the past week.  It is long, but mostly contains pictures.  

Cary and I drove to Eugene on Thanksgiving morning for our traditional dinner with my side of the family.

There were lots of people, lots of food ...

and lots of desert:

It was Casey's birthday; he is now 14 years old!  We gave him $30.  Cary told him that he had change if that was too much.

My daughter Kari (on the right) invited her friends Nichole and Matt to join us, and they fit right in:

I really love this picture of my cousin Sally, my cousin Scott and Scott's wife Nancy:

We stayed overnight that night in Eugene with my little bro and sister-in-law Maria.  Maria did some shopping with friends, and the guys and I watched the TCU game in the lounge across the street.

Friday morning, we drove through the rain to Olympia.  Actually, we were going to get there too early to check into our room, so we stopped off in Rochester at the Lucky Eagle Casnio for a couple of hours.  That turned into a profitable little stop for me, as I won around $300.

We were beat by the time we got to The Comfort Inn in Tumwater, so we let the kids know that we would see them all the next day.  We ordered a pizza delivered and went to bed early.

On Saturday, we visited with Cary's daughter Cheri and her family for awhile, and then headed over to his daughter Shanna's home.  Shanna and I went to Costco and Albertson's to get stuff for dinner, and I spent a bunch of my winnings on much needed clothes.

We had a great dinner of meatball sandwiches and an Italian salad that evening.  It was fun to all be together again.  Here are a few pictures:

Scott, John and Shanna

Collin

Cary, Kylie and Henry

Henry is so cute, wearing his Mr. Roger's sweater.

Johnny, Gage and Garrett were busy playing upstairs.

This stands for "Love you, Grandma!"

Sunday was a busy day.  First, we drove over to Hick's Lake, where Cary's friend Dick has a home.  We are thinking about hanging out in Olympia more frequently, and Dick said that we can park our 5th wheel there if we want to.

There seem to be little lakes every few hundred yards in the Olympia, Tumwater and Lacey areas.  I'll be posting more pictures about that soon.
 




The weather had cleared up after Friday's rain, and it was cold, clear and beautiful the rest of the time that we were there.  That made it easy for me to take pretty pictures.

After leaving Hick's Lake, we stopped by Cheri and Scott's again and said goodbye to Garrett, who was on his way back to college. We met his girlfriend Nikki and had a nice visit.

After we left there, we met up with Shanna, John, Collin and Johnny at Shari's for breakfast.  Santa stopped by with candy canes.

We dropped off the boys at home and drove to another lake, Lake St. Claire.  John and Shanna showed us around the lot that they had recently bought.  It was so pretty!  You can even water ski on this lake; it has lots of fingers and is rather large.

The reflections were stunning.

John tied down the dock.  I can't wait to go back here and play next summer.

We said goodbye to those who had to work the next day and went back to our room at The Comfort Inn in Tumwater.  (It is a decent place and only cost $79.00 a night, even though we really couldn't use the internet.  The staff is super nice, and you get a free breakfast.  It is a good place for the kids, and you can bring your dogs if you want to.)

On Monday, we went to the waterfront in Olympia, walked around taking pictures, and then ate a yummy oyster lunch at the Budd Bay Cafe.  I'll do a post on that later on too.  We spent the rest of the afternoon with Kylie.

I took a lot of pictures of the marina.  It was so pretty there.  

The bay was full of jellyfish.

Tuesday morning, we checked out of our room and met Cheri for coffee. 

We had a nice visit, and then drove back to the casino in Rochester to stay the night at their hotel before heading back to Oregon.  (The roads were awful in Oregon for a few days; very dangerous and icy.)

I had plans of taking a bunch of pictures of the casino and hotel, but that didn't pan out.  It was really nice there, and the rooms are large and well furnished.  They lower their rates during the week, and our room was only $99.00 for the night. 

I was resting in our room for a couple of hours, and Cary was playing blackjack and making a new friend.  Fred and Cary hit it off, and had so much in common.  I tried to call Cary but he didn't answer, so I went down to the casino to find him.  Cary introduced me to Fred, and we decided to eat dinner with him and his sweet wife Marjorie.  They had been married for 58 years.  We all went to the buffet, sat down and began eating dinner.  All of a sudden, Fred got a sharp pain in his groin area, lost consciousness and sadly later died on the way to the hospital. We helped Marjorie call her kids and then drove her to meet them at the freeway entrance so that they could take her to Olympia.

The hotel staff, security, EMT's and then the paramedics from Tumwater were all awesome in the way that they handled things.  We were just glad to be there to support Marjorie. Marjorie said that sometimes God puts certain people into your life just at the right time, and I think that she is right about that.  It was very heartbreaking though, as well as rather shocking.  

We left early the next morning, Wednesday, and made it home safely.  We were lucky to miss the in-between bouts of freezing rain. 

It was a busy week, and we did a lot of fun things with our families.  I developed all of my pictures yesterday and am now going to go to the store today and make us a good dinner tonight.  The Ducks are playing Arizona tonight at 6:00 to see if we will make it into the National Championship Game.  I am pretty sure that we will win.   GO DUCKS!!!

I hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving.  Thanks for sticking with me on this long post.

Hugs,
Kathy M.

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