Our Own Oregon Trail - Day 1

We are back and I'm going to try and back-post our trip if I can remember everything we did and saw. It's hard to get back into the swing of things after being completely unplugged for 8 days. I've looked at my Reader and see that I have over 160 posts to catch up on. I don't think I'll be able to read them all, but I'll try and catch up with everyone as much as possible.

The first day we flew into Portland and headed to John BarleyCorn to meet our friend Kevin (who moved from Colorado to Oregon) for lunch. I was glad that Kevin picked this spot because it's part of the McMeniman's group. I wanted to stay in their Old St. Francis School Hotel near Bend, but it was booked due to a yarn convention (I'm sure that's a really rowdy group of travelers). After having a delicious lunch including a pile of tater tots, we headed down to Glide where we were going to meet my parents for the night.

Our reservations were at Steelhead Run, a quaint Guest House along the Umpqua River. The place is currently for sale and it seems that the current owners don't maintain the outside as much as they probably used to. For example, here is what they have as an outdoor playground. We like to call it the Play Area of Doom. Anyone else find this slightly disturbing?


We also enjoyed several rounds of ping-pong despite the dust covering the table.


It could be a really beautiful place with a little TLC. Here is the river directly below the guest house. Morgan enjoyed "skipping rocks" across the river. Even Gigi, at 60-something learned how to skip a rock for the first time. Mark and I were a little concerned about the five Vultures and that enjoyed circling overhead. We were hoping they didn't know something that we didn't.


The rooms were wonderful - very clean, well maintained and quite large. Our room, The Heritage Room, came with a full kitchen. Overall it was a nice spot to stop for a night.