photos from visiting my folks in Brookings

First off, Ryan's email from yesterday says he's being transferred to a new area today...we'll have to wait till next week to see where they sent him. This'll be his 3rd area--one for each transfer. Wow.

We spent a week in Brookings, Oregon visiting my folks and also got to spend some time with my sister as our vacations overlapped. There were several fires going on in Oregon. This was part of our journey to the coast:

One of the big events of the week was going with my dad to Klamath, California to fly some RC (radio controlled) airplanes. First, we all practiced on the simulator on dad's computer. It was tough. Alex was definitely the best at that. Dad has a friend, Mike, who hooks his RC unit up to dad's...then Mike can take over the flying if it looks like you are going to crash. He took over a lot for my flight.

Denise, Dad, Glen, Hannah, and Alex getting ready--the airfield is in the middle of a hay field

Alex is in charge and needed next to no help from Mike

Hannah's turn

Denise went next (look toward the upper edge in the middle of the cloud to see the plane)

My plane is really hard to see. Look for the white dot in the clouds up and to the right of my head. My flight was named the most exciting--since I was such an erratic pilot.

my turn...but statistically speaking, Mike was probably doing the flying

Glen's turn

Dad's taking a turn, too

Mike flying one of his special planes...it's hovering vertically here

Mike getting his next plane ready for a flight

this bi-plane has a really cool smoke feature

did you catch that Snoopy is the pilot of the bi-plane?

Another big happening while we were there was the Festival of the Arts which was held at the Manly Art Center this year. Mom was a big part of the planning, setting up, and cleaning up since she's so involve in the art center. Ignore the white vendor's tent in the middle and focus on the textile work on the tree. It's called "tree bombing" and it was super neat. The trees were given sweaters of sorts. This bomb was my favorite because it had neat sea creatures on it...and I love the jellyfish hanging from the branches.

 Inside they had tables set up with quotes and crayons. I'd bet my bottom dollar that this stick figure is my mom's drawing.

Oh, for part of Thursday's drawing class at the art center, Hannah and Alex were the models. Often the artists give their drawings or paintings to the models. Here are some that Hannah and Alex got:

One year when we were visiting my parents there was only 1 day of sunshine. This year we didn't see the sun peek out even once in Brookings--lots of fog and cloud coverage and a bit of drizzle, though we did see the sun when we went to Klamath to fly the rc planes. That's OK, though. We left behind 100º heat in Fallon and 60º was OK with us.

We didn't go to the beach as often as we usually do, but here we are just north of Chetco Point. Hannah already owned a ukelele and then bought another one at a yard sale (one of our favorite things to do when we go to grandma and grandpa's house is yard saling and thrift storing). Here she is giving Alex a lesson while we were at the beach, the cold beach.

Glen is serenading me with a made up song about whales (btw, he doesn't know how to play the uke).

 Now, the reason Glen was singing about whales is...we actually saw one! It's not "whale season" but there was one spouting and flipping his tail. It took a while, but we managed to get photographic evidence [and in order to see it as anything besides a dark smudge on the ocean, we have to blow up the photo so much that the quality really stinks, but I declare it g.e. (good enough)]:
;

here's a different photo that's cropped

OK, so that is the blown up and cropped photo. This is what the original looks like--the whale is off the the left near the horizon...the photo above makes the whale seem so close to the shore, but he wasn't that close:

One big surprise for us was one day we bumped into former Fallon residents Rick and Katie Hammer and their family. They used to be in our ward here and Rick taught at the high school with Glen, too. That was fun.

So, we had a wonderful week as always. Thanks mom and dad and Denise!