May 20-23: We were home (at our marina) just for a few days for “intermission” between adventures. A couple of things needed to be done before we set off again. But first, son Brian invited us over for a Saturday night smoked-meat dinner. Yum! We took some side dishes and he served up some amazingly yummy smoked tri-tip. We enjoyed the evening with him, Amanda, and little O. And, this is our adorable eighth grandchild with his mommy, enjoying some relaxation in a recliner for a bit. Baby isn’t due to show his face until mid July, but I don’t think he’s going to stay put that long.
Next up was to take Kawi out of Nitro and haul him over to my nephew’s house to get some new tires put on. Yep – bigger tires are better, right? Well…. if you’re a fella in my family, yes. Fortunately, we know several family members with car trailers around here, so we didn’t have to rent one from U-haul like we do in Florida to haul Kawi around without taking Nitro.
Nephew John has a shop with all kinds of tools and machines. I mean… who else do you know that has a tire machine in their backyard shop?! He does a lot of automotive work with his own and his friends’ vehicles, and they do a lot of off-roading. He even kept our old tires because he said – ‘at least they hold air and can be useful around here’.
Yes – he also has a lift. Kenny has shop envy, but at least John is happy to have us come over with projects that he can help us with. This picture really shows the difference between our stock 31” tires and the new 35” tires. The good thing is that Kawasaki built the buggy to accommodate 35” tires without any modifications necessary.
Here’s Kawi with his new tennis shoes on. They don’t look that big, do they? Probably since he has a lot of suspension travel area so the tires don’t sit anywhere close to the wheel wells.
With that project done (which we did on Sunday while John was home), my mechanic worked on rebuilding the Stu-zuki on Monday. In just a couple of hours, he go the new head on, and the motor ran good. The electronic start is still temperamentally working only when it wants to. It still occasionally has amnesia. Hopefully it’ll all settle into itself and be a good little dinghy motor again.
On Tuesday, I got to have a night out with daughter-in-law Amanda. She had tickets to “Stars on Ice” with her brother and grandma, and she invited me to go. We had to leave their house before Brian got home from work, so Grampa got to have some one-on-one time with 16 month old Little O. They watched sports on TV and did just fine, and then when daddy got home, he got to go out for dinner for guys-night-out. It was a fun evening for everybody!
The “Stars” are Olympic medal winning skaters, and the show was really great. It was in a small arena where the Seattle Kraken Pro Hockey team plays, and we had ‘center-ice’ seats. My favorite style of skating is the couples ice-dancing, and the performances were beautifully done with such grace.
It was a great show, and the performers seemed to really enjoy it – to skate for fun and a show, rather than as competition. It’s amazing how 14 skaters can move together like a precise school of fish just floating effortlessly across the ice in perfect synchronization.
*****
May 24-28……Now – On with our regularly scheduled programming: Camping with three Littles.
Wednesday was Kenny’s birthday, and we drove about seven hours to get Nitro over to the southeast corner of Washington state. It was a beautiful day for a drive! This is the Columbia River at Vantage, and it was as peaceful looking as a pond.
We don’t drive this part of Washington very often, and it was really some unique scenery with multiple gorges.
There is no really great route to get to where we were going. We took the shortest route for mileage and time, but that meant that we were on some roads with lots of squiggles and uppy-downys. This spot had four arrows in sight for the squiggles.
We arrived in our son-in-law’s home town of Pomeroy, and took a right turn to the south to go up to the Blue Mountains. This town and surrounding area is a huge grain production farming portion of the state, and the fields were almost florescent green. It was so pretty!
Cameron had pin-pointed the family’s camping spot on the map for me, and we drove right to it. Some of his family was already there, so they helped us figure out a good spot to park. The choices were a little bit limited due to our overall length for maneuvering, and our height for getting under branches, and this spot worked great. Henry had to shift into four-wheel-drive to push our heavy Nitro into the spot because the road was a little bit muddy.
Here is where we went… Waaaaaay over in the corner of the state. (Moscow is in Idaho.)
The triplet family arrived in the morning on Thursday, and it wasn’t long until we took the buggies out for a spin. Saki and Kawi are back at it, together again!
Of course, any time we stop, I have to find flowers.
My little flower hunters were hot on the trail with me, and they love to find all different colors of flowers. That can sometimes be quite a challenge which makes the day more fun.
There is some beautiful scenery and views here in the Blue Mountains.
Some of the roads were a bit dusty, but it was really a pretty day.
Cameron has spent many winters riding snow-mobiles here, so he knew some fun places to go. Although he said that it all looks a lot different without snow. 😉. Both he and Kenny did some hill climbing with the buggies. The dirt/rocks were really loose, so they needed some good speed to get up the hill. It was big braaping fun.
Back at camp, more people had showed up, and there was some wood cutting in progress. Fallen dead trees are available everywhere here in the Umatilla National Forest. I’ve always pronounced this as “YOU-ma-tilla” 🫵, but once I thought about it, I wasn’t sure. You know, the whole thing like Natchez in Mississippi is pronounced like “Matches”, and Naches in Washington is pronounced “Na-CHEEZE”. And Beaufort in North Carolina is “BO-fort”, and Beaufort in South Carolina is “B’YOO-fert”. 🤷♀️ So I thought, maybe this should be pronounced “OO-ma-tilla” 👀. Or maybe it is “UHM-a-tilla” 🤔. But Cameron confirmed that it is YOU-ma-tilla. Whew! My Washington Native prounouncer thinking was correct. 😉
The littles like to help and they do a pretty good job if they have specific things to do and if they are working alongside with others. They had fun hauling wood to the pile and stacking it up.
This cracked me up when Char came to our camper all dressed and ready to ride. On Friday they decided to let us lead the way, so they were dressed to eat our dust.
Oooh- we found lots of flower colors today!!
And we even found a lady bug that was trying to hide.
Trying to get all three squirrels to be still AND look at the camera at the same time is a feat, but we did it!! Oh how I love this family and am so grateful to be spending time with them!!
More color! Cooper’s favorite color is orange, so we were super happy to find orange. Grampa thought I was a goofball, but when I saw orange, I said “STOP!”. He looked at me like I was crazy, like WHY?!, but then he understood the urgency. 🥰
We had a super fun time on some trails that were originally 50” wide trails, but over time have widened a bit. Our wide buggies actually fit just fine, although it sometimes added a little challenge . Shannon was driving the limo this day, and she did awesome. That was a two-point turn for us, and a three-point turn for them, but that wasn’t going to stop them!
Back at camp, everyone had arrived for a full-on party. Long time friends were camping here too. Pomeroy is a small town, and seriously – everybody knows everybody, and they all know where everyone is camped. When we came in on Wednesday, there was a truck and camper trailer behind us, and I’m sure they wondered who the heck the rig from Florida was!
The afternoon and evening fun included this game called Beersbee. There is a bottle on top of the stick that the opposing team tries to knock off with the frisbee. The receiving team must hold a drink in one hand, and catch the frisbee AND catch the bottle if it comes off the stick. It was pretty fun to watch and there was a lot of laughter from the two teams.
We were camped in the trees, but there was a ridge very nearby. When I saw the sun was about to set, I asked Kenny if he wanted to leave the campfire and go watch the sunset with me. He looked at me like I was ridiculous. 🤷♀️. So I hopped into Kawi and started that way on the trail. I stopped to give him another chance, and he reluctantly was sauntering my way. Apparently the other women around the campfire shamed him into it. 🤭. Good job ladies!! We sat in Kawi and watch the sun bring this fun day to a close. It was beautiful.
Back at the campfire, the big pile of wood was being put to good use. They build big fires in this group! We had a couple of big blue-tooth speakers that were paired up, so there was music going all day around camp until bedtime. There was nobody camped near us (everybody spreads out in various places all over the forest here), and the music set a really fun foundation for atmosphere without imposing on anybody else. We were up until about 1:00am on Friday night laughing and dancing around the campfire. The littles went to bed at 8:00, so they were up by 6:00am the next morning. 😴
Saturday night somebody put on a really weird play list of very strange stuff that roughly qualified as ‘music’. 😵💫 Some of us were really tired from being up late the night before, and I threw in the towel by about 10:00 because the music was too weird for this ol grama and there wasn’t a lot going on around the fire. Apparently it was too weird for everybody, because I no sooner got into bed to read a little bit, and the normal country/classic rock combo came back on. 🤷♀️
The four-seater Saki is really a five-seater for this little family.
My flower slaves are hard at work every time we stop. It gives them something to do, and we have fun looking at all the different flower colors and shapes.
On Saturday, we were going to let Cam lead, but the kids couldn’t see us, so we had to lead again. We went on some really skinny trails. Normally that’s not a bad thing, but going through branches and stuff is hard on the boys in the back seat of Saki because the branches slap them in the face. 😳 We did come to one place that we could not go through.
There was a gate that has been closed for years (since trees were growing up through it). To the left was a BIG tree. That wasn’t the problem so much as the BIG tree had broken off (how? 🤷♀️) and fell along side the trail, thereby blocking the outside of the corner. Some people had cut the jagged end closest to us, so that narrow buggies could get through the squeeze and turn. But there was no way either of us could get through and make the corner. So we had to turn around and find another way.
We made it up to Misery Mountain. Cam was so funny because he said it all looks so different without many feet of snow. Aren’t they the cutest?! ❤️
We gathered up the squirrels for a pic with grama and grampa. We had so much fun with them!!
Back down the trail and back to camp we went. It was cloudy and cold up at the top, at 6200’ elevation. Our camp was at about 4900’. We had some light rain on Friday morning, but we had lots of spurts of sunshine and 60-ish degree weather over the weekend. Way better than last year, when they said they had rain and SNOW over the weekend in camp!
A few more random shots of my flower hunters.
Not many flowers here, grampa!
These flowers were contributed to a lovely bouquet that we made back at camp, and it graced our cooking table for the weekend.
These are the tracks from our three days of riding: pink on Thursday, purple on Friday, and brown on Saturday.
This was our camping spot. We were a little bit away from the rest of the gang, but close enough to be part of the camp. All the kids and dogs were free range chickens, and nobody got lost. One morning I woke up to ‘knock-knock-knock’ and “Graaaaama, Graaaaaaama, GRAMA!”. It was Char coming over so they could cook some breakfast stuff in my oven with the pizza-stone even-heating feature. Another morning, Shannon had french toast ready at her camper, and sent Kason over to get us. He was the persistent salesman that just keeps knocking but doesn’t say anything. ☺️
We left camp at about noon on Sunday to drive back home to Island Girl. We wanted to avoid the Monday Memorial Day traffic and we needed to get home to get ready to take the Girl north to the San Juan Islands for our next adventure on Tuesday. Traffic was light and easy on Sunday, which was wonderful! We have other friends that were in Eastern Washington over the weekend that came home to the West side on Monday, and they said the traffic was AWE-FUL! Whew! Good choice on our part! We had a fantastically fun weekend camping with these crazy kids, and look forward to more camping adventures to come this summer. In the meantime, we have some boating to do!