Well, I'm glad you asked and the answer is simple - to visit more cemeteries. Great grandfather Andrew Wise and great grandmother Viola Wise are buried with one of their daughters in Newburg. Great Aunt Elsie and Great Uncle Ralph Lehman (and his parents) are buried in Dundee. Then, down in Salem is buried Great Great Uncle James Monroe Ward and his wife Mary. Our main focus was to visit and photograph all of these grave sites and we did. If you let it, documenting families will consume you.
But, that wasn't the end of all the excitement because we met four of our friends for meals. In a prior life, I worked for Arlan Dabling and he and his wife have become our friends. We have broken bread with these two in Oklahoma, Arizona, Washington, California and now Oregon. We hope to meet with them this fall in Utah. They have a daughter that lives with her family in Dundee and that is why they were in the area and made it easy for us to meet for lunch.
The other couple, Tony and Sandi Olsen, we try to see whenever we are in the Corvallis area and this year, they were in Portland and stopped on their way home for a long lunch with us. Visit, visit, visit - it goes on and on. Once again, this is a work relationship that turned into a good friendship, only, in this case, Sharon worked for Tony in her previous life.
Was that the end of it? No way. Brother Scott and his wife were camping with their Allegro club in Silver Falls and once you have driven all the way to Salem, Silver Falls is just a few turns down the road and that's what we did. We hadn't seen them in nearly a year and had a lot of catching up to do. We will move up to Hillsboro from here and have a lot more time to visit with them and their kids and grandkids.
Our lifestyle often presents little surprises to us that we must deal with and we often don't have a lot of time to study the situation and we got surprised during drive back to Lafayette from Silver Falls. Did you know that Oregon has three ferries that cross the Willamette River? No, we didn't either until our CoPilot software directed us down the road to the ferry. Nope, no warning that we would have to cross the river on a boat until we saw the sign telling us that the Wheatland Ferry was four miles down the road. We paused for a moment, the conversation stopped and we both thought why not? Let's check out the ferry and if we don't like the situation, we will turn around and find another way. So, we kept going. If we had the trailer behind the truck, we might have behaved differently but it turns out that we would have fit (trailer and all) on the ferry.
A few years ago, our friends Janice and Dick Connolly regaled us with the funny story of driving to the Oregon coast in their motor home and being surprised when they encountered a ferry that took them across the Willamette. At the time of the story telling, they had no idea where that ferry crossing was in Oregon. Well, we called them and now, they know. It was the same ferry.
Here are a couple of photos:
Oh, yeah, this ferry is bigger than the one that took us across the Yukon River in 2007.
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