Beaver Believers

Are You Ready For Some Football?

 

Last year our Oregon State University Beavers were just awful at football. Won 3 Lost 9. Ouch. So when the Recruitment Dinner was held last January we attended, and as you can see, we were enthusiastic about prospects for this year.

Every Thursday night we attend the coaches talk show where our coach, Mike Riley, and The Voice of The Beavers, Mike Parker, discuss this week's game. In the foreground are Jim and Cheryl Henderson who have become our best Beaver Believer friends.

Every home game we roll out our motorhome for pregame tailgating. This is the Langley family from Klamath Falls who joined us for the Washington State game.

Our most loyal Beaver Believer is Dave Hummel and sometimes his son Quinn and daughter-in-law Katie join us too.

Tailgating requires gourmet cooking. Here Dave prepares wild duck breasts wrapped in bacon. Yuuuuuuuum.

Reser Stadium, the home of 45,000 wild Beaver fans

This is my favorite photo. The enthusiastic student section only allows in fans who scored very low on their reading exams. Look closely.

This year we were predicted to be last in our leage of 12 teams. Ha!  After 6 weeks we have won all 6 games and are ranked 7th inTHE NATION!

 

 

 

So we are having a LOT of fun with our Beavers this year. We are actually schocked by all the success and the bubble could burst any week now but until it does...

GO BEAVERS!

From the Hoh to the Hospital. We Go See Washington

 The Hoh Rain Forest

This summer has been busy for Sheryl and me and although we had a great time in California with the family, Sheryl was sick and we just headed straight home. We could see our window of opportunity in August, so we packed up the motor home and decided to go see the parts of Washington State that were new to us. It was 100 degrees when we left here but after visiting Tyler and Meghan's house project we headed for the Washington Coast and out came the sweatshirts, and the heat was history.  We took three days heading slowly up the Olympic Peninsula viewing all the Lewis and Clark history sights, eating fresh crab, and having wonderful walks on the beach. The motor home life is lazy. The motor home life can be slow. The motor home life is good.  In Olympic National Park we headed up into the Hoh Valley and walked amongst some amazing trees. The cedar and spruce are unbelievable as they get 12 feet of rain per year.

We seem to stop at all the sights.

This tree was the only thing older than us in the park

After the rain forest we drove around to the north side of the park and up to Hurricane Ridge on a magnificent day. The 360 views were stunning.

We did have some fun meals in the little towns we visited but normally our chief cook whips us up something in the motor home then we have an evening by the camp fire.

Deception Pass - Whidbey Island

We had never seen North Cascades National Park, and knew nothing of it.  However being that it was a National Park we figured it must be worth seeing. Was it ever. The drive up Highway 20 just gets better and better culminating at Washington Pass. It's a gorgeous hunk of geology and well worth the drive.

We have to take pictures of everthing

Yeah, that's not the sign ya wanna see on your vacation.  As we traversed down the east side of the cascades we decided to visit Lake Chelan as it's a place I had often heard of but never seen.  It was pretty cool, a little like New Zealand's Queenstown. It hasn't the same natural beauty (no place does) but it has bunches of watersports and adventure activities for folks of all interests.  We had trouble finding a campsite but finally did and pulled out the chairs next to the water, poured a cool one, brought out the pistachios and life was good. We planned out the next day's 50 mile boat ride, trip to a waterfall etc., when Sheryl began to complain about her foot starting to hurt.  We headed into town and had a fun dinner but it was on the second floor and she struggled just getting up the stairs.  Even after wine her foot still hurt but now she could not get down the stairs unaided and was nearly in tears. She just could not walk and I rounded up a wheelchair for her, when a guy in a golf cart rescued her and drove her back to the motorhome where we could barely get her up the two stairs.  She was sure her foot was broken and I thought it was gout as she had had no trauma to her foot and it was obvious she was n excruciating pain. She later rated it as bad as childbirth! I had to drive back to the campsite to pick up our things and she was just wailing in misery by now. That was it. At her request/demand it was straight to the hospital where gout was diagnosed and morphine was injected in he backside, pills were swallowed, and after half an hour she could again bear the pain. Our vacation was over. It was a long drive home.  We are tired of these doctor adventures on our summer trips. Bummer.

You can tell this was taken on the way out as she is smiling. You shoulda seen the way in...

One More Pot

After Sheryl made her first "customized" pot, the one with the dinosaur for our good fiend Pat Ward, she began to incubate ideas.  About that time we were invited to the wedding of Quinn Hummel and Katie Vashaw. Quinn is the son of another good friend, Dave Hummel, and we have known Quinn since he was about a year old and he is a wonderful young man just finishing up dental school. Sheryl wondered if for a wedding gift she could do another personalized pot. But what design?  Dave and Quinn have spent hours and hours fishing the rivers of Oregon together for those beautiful wild steelhead.  They truly are magnificent fish and the most prized of all fish here in the Pacific Northwest. It seems that a couple of seasons ago Dave caught a 20-pounder, the fish of a lifetime, and decided to have it mounted (that's another good story).  He finally received the mount and proudly displays it in his home on Klamath Lake.  I had taken photos of the fish and we decided it would be just the ticket to serve as the design on this special wedding pot for Quinn and Katie.

                                       The Wedding Gift

                                           Rear View

                                         The "leftover" pot

In case the pot fell victim to one of the many bad things that can happen to pots in their creation, she actually made two, hoping that at least one would survive the workshop, the firing, and the packing up.  As luck would have it, both turned out beautifully so she gave her favorite to the Bride and Groom and the "leftover" to Dave, to display with his fish.

Eeuuuuuuu, now that's a bad eye!

Honest. I'd never hit her! But all of a sudden a vessel popped under the conjunctive and Eeeuuuuk! It's getting better ever day.

She's Makin' More Pots...

We've got this friend who likes dinosaurs...

On To Costa Rica

After a week in Guatemala and lighter by two wallets we flew to Costa Rica, rented a car and drove down to Sierpe, the sleepy little village where I had fished last November.  We caught the water taxi and slithered down 6 miles of jungle river where we had an exciting crossing of the bar into the Pacific and then boated on to Drake Bay where we spent 6 nights.  This area of Costa Rica is absolutely wild, it's a huge rain forest and Eco-travellers come to see the wildlife. We sure did!  Our first night there we took a frog tour and saw bunches of the famous little green, red-eyed tree frogs, not to mention other frogs, a snake, trap door spiders and a gawd awful Brazilian wandering spider which is extremely aggressive and if a it bites a man VERY BAD things happen to his very bad area. OUCH! (You can look it up! It's disgusting). Despite one of those hairy little beasts leaping to attack our guide, no one got bit and we returned safely to our little waterside hotel. On another hike we saw all four Costa Rican monkies, all sorts of birds, reptiles and mammals. We even were about to step out into a stream where it entered the ocean when our guide instantly cured us of that idea, by pointing out a 10-foot bull shark cruising out in front of us, inside of the breakers. It's a scary place.
Every other evening, about happy hour we were attacked my a nasty troop of white faced monkies that seemed to think they could join us and steal everything in sight while hissing and spitting and behaving like really bad 6th grade boys. It made for an interesting cocktail hour!

                                        Our Hotel

Our last day Mike and I were going to paddle some sit-on-top kayaks out to where we could catch some waves. It looked like fun but I wasn't sure if I got dumped, if I could clamber back on board, so Mike and I went about about 50 feet off the beach where I found I could indeed wrestle my wide body back on the kayak.  I practiced a few times then we came in to the beach for a while. Not long after we came in Sheryl (bless her soul) noticed that in the ocean, right where I had been floppin' around with Mike, there was now an 8-foot salt water crocodile prowling about. He seemed to be hoping to grab a wounded bird on the beach but it gave me the shivers to think just how juicy my fat arse must have looked to him.
It was a great trip...Thanks Mike and Patty.

                                 Night time is just scary!

                                   The famous little tree frog.

             One hairy scary bastard. The most deadly in the world!

                 That's the dorsal and tail fin of a bull shark!

                                      Mike and iguana

                       Yep, he was right outside our room!

                                        The Bad Boys

                                    Hey! It was a rain forest!

               This had been our swimming hole all week long!

Guatemala

                                We took a lot of pictures.

For years we have been hearing about the wonders of Guatemala from our friends the Stouts who were there in the Peace Corps a hundred years ago, and from Tyler and Meghan who spent a month there last summer studying Spanish.  Our good friends Mike and Patty Reeder had planned a week long vacation in Costa Rica so we decided that since we would be joining them in Central America we would stop off first for a week in Guatemala. Our first stop was Flores, a little island town that could have been Mediterranean from where we headed off to Tikal. Tyler had assured us it was spectacular and Wow! Was it ever! These are the best Mayan ruins in the world and we were truly impressed by their grandeur.

 

Mike and Patty

After Tikal we headed off to Antigua, a very charming city full of markets, restaurants and the local Guatemalans who live in the highlands, all seem to be around four feet tall and must dress in the most colorful garments in the world.

We had read about the colorful local market of Chichicastenango, so we hopped in a van and headed up into the highlands.  The market was a spectacular rainbow of Guatemalan weaving and handicrafts.  As we approached the crowded streets I reminded our group of how this looked like pick-pocket territory and we plunged right in.  Sheryl had buttoned her wallet into a front pocket. Mike zipped his into a front pocket.  Patty had her purse clutched to her chest and I stuck my hand into my pocket and held my wallet tightly.  The market was fabulous and we snapped photos, shopped and bulldozed our way through the tightly packed mass of humanity.  After about 45 minutes Sheryl shrieked, "My wallet's gone!"  Mike shouted, "mine too," and we were all just devastated by the thefts.  What could we do?  Quickly we realized, not a damned thing, we had been had.  It soon sunk in that we had better quickly cancel our cards and such which was difficult but with help from our friends the Pines, back in Oregon, we managed to get everything cancelled.  Thankfully they did not get our passports and no attempts were made with or cards so the real loss was the dollars in cash and the chaos it created in managing the money that Patty and I still had...so they stole our money, but not our trip.

  Patty quickly mastered all the Guatemalan musical instruments

         Lets see? Can you pick out which one is the tourist?