Beach Days Oxnard

Our family rented a beach house in Oxnard, California to be in closer proximity to a wedding and baby shower we would be attending in Goleta, and Santa Clarita, California. All four couples had their own room and we had 3 bathrooms to make it easy to get ready for our events. We also had a full kitchen.

The house was a short block to the beach. Dear and I arrived before our kids so we took a walk to the beach to get our first look at Pacific waves in a long time.

On this evening a couple of the Channel Islands were visible on the horizon.

The sunset was beautiful with nice views from the upper decks of the house. This was Friday evening. On Saturday we were busy getting ready for and helping at the wedding venue so there was no time for a beach visit.

On Sunday morning we pulled together a breakfast for all of us and for my brother’s family who were staying close by. After breakfast and before we got ready for the Baby shower for Addy we all walked to the beach and enjoyed some fun in the sun. Some braver souls took a plunge in the cold winter Pacific waters.

My brother and his family left the beach house to head to the airport flying back to Dallas and the rest of us got ready and headed east for Addy’s baby shower that the women enjoyed and the guys headed to a shotgun range. Fun times for all.

We all checked out of our beach house on Monday the 16th and headed in different directions. Four of our kids flew home on Monday Dear flew home on Tuesday and I stayed on at my sister’s in Huntington Beach. Josh and Laura stayed most of the week and flew home on Friday braving the rain soaked freeway to Los Angeles International Airport.

I’ve been able to enjoy two more glorious days at two different beaches and a day at the Getty Museum while I’ve been in southern California. When I get back to the Seattle area on Tuesday I’ll finish posting about my days here. The rain has been persistent here especially on Friday and today. Streets have turned into rivers. There have been several flash flood warnings in the Los Angeles Basin especially in areas that suffered fires recently.

This collage shows some mild images compared to what we’ve seen since. Looking forward to catching up with your blog posts when I get back to my own space up north! Blessings.

Good, Very Good, Glorious!

There is so much to share from this good, very good, and glorious weekend we are experiencing. This photo is of our nephew Joe and his new bride Hannah with our dear old 93 year old Pop (94 in May). Glorious and Glory to God! More to come so stay tuned!

Keep Looking Up…

A little postcard from me to you. Hope for my snowbound friends this adds a little light to your day. Today is wedding day for my brother’s youngest son. Fun times are afoot!

A, the Finale…

ABC Wednesday is starting their farewell tour. This will be the last trip through the alphabet with Mrs. Nesbitt and her team. On this farewell tour I will be looking back with a mix of old and new for each letter. Click on ABC Wednesday to see what others are sharing.

Amish, animals the Amish use and Architecture are my choices for A. All these photos are from our trip to Amish Country in Indiana and Ohio the end of September (2016) with the Mennonite Girls Can Cook.

The architecture photos are from the village of Millersburg in Holmes County, Ohio. I haven’t shared these photos on my blog before. Millersburg is in the heart of the largest Amish settlement. This is the Courthouse at the county seat.

We found the downtown to be charming with many interesting shops and original architecture.

Millersburg was incorporated February 17, 1835.

Hotel Millersburg built in 1847 is on the left. The Hotel, which has been placed on the US Department of Interior’s National Register of Historic Places, is located in the center of the Millersburg National Historic district.

Now to the present…how’s January 2017 shaping up? Things are busy here and I’ll have a lot to share later. We are still cold and icy but nothing to compare with other parts of the country.

Twice in December

Twice in December we drove north to the town of La Conner to enjoy a meal and a stroll.

We enjoy the farm scenes that we pass along the way.

At the end of December we celebrated Katie’s birthday at Anelia’s which features some good Polish fare and other light dishes.

At the beginning of December we ate at the Oyster and Thistle for our anniversary.

I’m linking up to Mosaic Monday with Maggie at Normandy Life.

I’m also linking up for The Barn Collective with Tom The Backroads Traveler.

We had a cold quiet weekend mostly with small projects accomplished and started. I lasted just a very short while outside starting the Apple Tree Pruning. It didn’t take long for my hands to complain from the cold. I’ll be doing that project in short shifts. The Pear tree needs pruning also. January is full of events for us at this Old House.

Today at the Mennonite Girls Can Cook blog I posted a French Onion Soup for two recipe. I was inspired by the soup I had at the Oyster and Thistle in La Conner in the mosaic above. Happy Monday!

2016 January-June in Mosaics…

January: Dear started a consulting job from home. We celebrated January birthdays. A business trip to San Francisco with reunions with old friends from my college days.

February: Our Lenten Rose bloomed early. We had a Superbowl party with a Chinese New Year theme with souvenirs I bought at San Francisco’s Chinatown. We also enjoyed a Valentines day lunch with a view in Bellevue.

March: We had a sister’s weekend. We celebrated my Medicare birthday in Bellingham with the Mennonite Girls and our hubbies. Dear and I had an overnight in Vancouver, B.C. to continue celebrating my birthday. Katie and Andrew celebrated their 5th anniversary!

Easter landed at the end of March and deserved it’s own mosaic. Our family was all together. Kulich baking, Seerney Paska, Easter egg hunts and Raclette all happened during Easter weekend.

April: We took a quick trip to Eastern Washington to work on some projects at Dan and Jamie’s. Late in the month I went along with Dear on a business trip to San Antonio, Texas. While there I drove to Austin to meet up with my brother’s family for a few hours.

May: Mother’s day with the kids on this side of the mountains. Dear and I took a road trip to Whatcom Falls and on the way home enjoyed stopping at a restaurant on Chuckanut Drive for lunch.

May: Two trips across the line to Canada to meet our play writer and later to meet a favorite blogger who gives so much encouragement to us Mennonite Girls, Rosella.

June: I flew down to be with family and enjoy my sister’s open house in her new digs.

June: A trip to Leavenworth where our family and our new daughter in law’s family enjoyed a weekend together eating and river rafting.

June: Father’s day brunch downtown Seattle with a photo op on Queen Anne Hill overlooking downtown Seattle.

June: We finished off June with a road trip to Yellowstone National Park and Cody Wyoming with stays in Montana coming and going. June really was packed full!

Six full months of blessings with people we love and trips to places we had never seen before. I’ll share July to December later. Dear’s consulting job ended in June and we began our time of wondering if we were unemployed or if we were retired.

How are you spending the last days of 2016? We are planning a little get together on New Year’s Eve after the Peach Bowl between our Washington Huskies and Alabama. We are the underdogs and will be cheering our Dawgs on to victory. Time will tell. Win or lose we will ring in the New Year with gratefulness to God for all He has done this year in our lives and the lives of our friends and family.

Anniversary Jaunt…

…a short excursion or journey for pleasure.

Yesterday the 7th of December we took a little drive north to La Conner for a anniversary meal together a day late.

Cheers to us and our 42 years together!

Our choices off the lunch menu were Puttanesca above for the mister and Beef Bourguignon below for the missus.

We shared a bread pudding for dessert.

The day was very crisp, cold, and clear.

Later today they are forecasting snow for our neck of the woods and several school districts are releasing students two hours early so buses don’t get stuck. We have our Small Group Christmas Potluck tonight and I hope that our guests will be able to make it up our hill if it snows and home again safe and sound. We are putting off buying our Christmas tree until the freezing temps we are having change to more normal temps next week.

Do you have snow yet? Do you usually get snow?

Prayers for Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge

To remind me to pray for the people of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge I’m re-posting about one of the days from Katie and my road trip from Seattle to Jacksonville, North Carolina in May of 2014. We were driving her and a lot of her stuff back to Camp Le Jeune in anticipation of Andrew’s return from Afghanistan.

Praying for this area of our country that is burning. Praying for rain and containment. Also praying for the people who have lost everything. Not forgetting to pray, too, for the Firefighters and First Responders.

From May of 2014…

We left Hendersonville, Tennessee after a stop at Starbucks and filling up our gas tank at a Kroeger Grocery store Station. Kroeger in Washington is either our Fred Meyer stores or our QFC stores.

Right about here on the road our clocks turned forward an hour and we were now in the Eastern Time Zone!

We really weren’t prepared for our drive through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge and the strange sights we would see.

This was promising but then we drove into the bizarre world of Pigeon Forge.

What!?

The Hatfields and the McCoys!

The Titanic?

We weren’t able to make it to Rushmore and this did not make up for it!

A Bavarian Denny’s? This town had an amazing amount of dinner theaters of different genres to experience. There were some great looking miniature golf properties but so many other ~~tacky~~ unusual properties.

We did not divert our path further to go to Dollywood.

Now this was more like it. This was the scenery we were expecting on our Smoky Mountain Detour.

This was in the town of Gatlinburg. This town had a lot of candy shops, donut shops, fudge shops, taffy shops and Whiskey shops.

Ripley’s Aquarium was also located here. I’m scared to think of what kind of creatures you would see in there.

We bought a sandwich here and headed out to our destination on this day which was Asheville, North Carolina.

We laughed real hard when we crossed this river 8 times during our detour!

We made it to Asheville at 5:30, checked into our hotel and then got ready for our dinner reservation at the Omni Grove Hotel on their Sunset Terrace. That experience will be a future post!

We are so happy to be here in Asheville for a two day stretch. We spent most of the day at the Biltmore Estate properties today and walked our feet off. We are chilling in our hotel room tonight having a picnic in our room instead of heading out to eat. The weather was beautiful today. Tomorrow we drive our final miles on this road trip across the U.S.A.

Thanks to all of you bloggy friends for following along with us on this journey across the U.S.A.

Now back to 2016 I’ll be linking this post to signs, signs with Lesley.

Concrete, Washington

On a road trip we took early in October we drove through the little town of Concrete along the Cascades Highway and Skagit River. Concrete is a town in north-central Skagit County, Washington, United States. The population was 732 at the 2010 census.

St. Catherine Catholic Church.

Community Bible Church

Mount Baker Presbyterian Church

Concrete Assembly of God. This is one of three oldest wood structures in Concrete that survived several fires prior to 1921. After all the fires the city decided to use their ample supply of concrete for future commercial buildings.

How Concrete Got Its Name

Early settlers came to the Baker River in 1871, originally calling the settlement on the west bank “Minnehaha.” In 1890, the townsite was platted by Magnus Miller, a post office was set up, and the name “Baker” was adopted. On the east bank of the river, the community that sprang up around the Washington Portland Cement Company (1905) was named “Cement City.” After the Superior Portland Cement Company plant (1908) was built in Baker, it was decided to merge the two towns, and in 1909, after much discussion, the new community settled on the name “Concrete.”

The Concrete Fire Dept. and Police Dept. stand side by side sharing a mural on the front of their buildings.

I’m linking up to InSPIREd Sunday with Beth and Sally and to Monday Mural at Oakland Daily Photo.

We are having a quiet Saturday as predicted. All outdoor surfaces are wet but not puddly. The rain is just a mist so far. Have you started shopping for Thanksgiving day? I haven’t yet since we are going to friends for the big meal. We are thinking of making our own turkey after Thanksgiving on the Traeger grill this year. Time will tell. Hope your weekend is going well.

Sedro-Woolley

Sedro-Woolley was founded on a can-do spirit brought by hard working folks as they made their way into the great forests of the area. This tradition of hard work and community was well documented by photographer Darius Kinsey whose works are on display in town and at the Sedro-Woolley Museum. The downtown is decorated with historical murals, large cedar statues carved by chainsaw and hand finished, and attractive gas lamp replicas.

This mural artist signs his name with a Bible verse. On this one it’s Psalm 46:10

“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”

This signature is hard to see but it’s Fredrick Sutliffe again and the Bible verse posted on this mural was John 3:16~

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Until it closed in October 2010, Holland Drugs of Sedro-Woolley was the oldest continuously operated business in Skagit county outside of LaConner. Its roots began in 1889 in the old town of Sedro on the north shore of the Skagit river as one of the first businesses near Mortimer Cook’s original general store. Seventeen-year-old Albert E. Holland arrived in old Sedro on July 15, 1886, and was immediately hired by Cook to be his clerk. Holland parlayed his original drug store into one of the largest pioneer fortunes in Sedro-Woolley.

1 John 4:8 ~ ^“Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

This looked like the newest mural on the side of a Mexican Restaurant.

The Bible reference from Fredrick on this one is Rom. 6:23 ~ ^“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This very large mural is painted on the side of a building that defines part of the outdoor space called Hammer Heritage Square in honor of the Hammer family, pioneers here from the 19th century.

The artist signed his work in the form of a wanted poster. Madd Artist. Name: John Maddox-Alias: The Bald Dude-Last Spotted: Fighting the Mural Deadline-Crime: Brush onslaught with the intent to paint- Gang Members: I won’t list them all. At the very bottom it says In Memory of Bill Bowley +.

This chain saw carving by Phil Finton won 4th place in 1999 at the Loggerodeo Chainsaw Carving Contest.

Loggerodeo is an annual event held on July 4th in Sedro-Woolley, the chainsaw carving capitol of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest.

Daddy’s Little Logging Princess. I didn’t get a closeup on who carved this one. There were several other carvings along Metcalf Street in the historic business area of Sedro-Woolley.

Sedro-Woolley was a fun stop on Dear and my Fall drive in the early part of October to areas of the Skagit Valley. It would be interesting to head out to this town on the 4th of July with ear plugs to see the chainsaw carving contest in action.

I’m linking up to ABC Wednesday for S is for Sedro-Woolley. Thank you Mrs. Nesbitt and Roger’s team of ABC’ers for keeping us all in line.

I’ve decided to add one more link for this post called Our World Tuesday.

Speaking of saws, there is a noisy one in action in our basement today as Dear is framing out a niche that has needed attention for a long time. He will be adding shelves to the space that I get to fill up. That’s dangerous. Before and after photos to come after completion. Yikes! Thanksgiving is next week!

The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b.

To honor and encourage

Category Archives: Travel