April 30, 2007
July 19, 2001
I wonder if we’ve made a terrible mistake - I mean by starting our trip in Sisters, Oregon. How is anyplace else going to compare? Every day has been jam-packed with new and exciting adventures. All while gazing at the kind of beauty that if beheld a moment too long would become blurry from the tears that threaten to spring up against your will. Yep, I think we could have made a strategic error.
I actually need to begin today’s journal entry with last night. After I wrote to you, we all went outside and laid under the blankets and under the stars. We saw Mars, The Milky Way, The Summer Cross, a couple of dozen satellites and a few shooting stars that I will never forget. The highlight was catching one shooting star intersect another one and keep on going as it crossed the entire sky. We forced ourselves to go inside sometime after midnight with the consolation that we would do this again real soon and spend the whole night next time.
Steve and I put the kids to bed and then we stayed up another hour just reading through so many of the emails that you have sent. I was so touched by your encouragement, suggestions for visiting your hometown and the fresh understanding that we really were making new friends all over the world. It may surprise you to know that I’m not normally a particularly emotional person. But I felt myself getting downright sentimental thinking about how much care went into your emails. Thank you very much for that.
Okay, enough of this mushy stuff. There’s too much to tell you about today’s adventures before I get too sleepy to type. We started the day with another fabulous breakfast lovingly prepared for us by our friends, Sheila and Bill. Their girls, Rebecca, Rachel and Marissa played a quick game of “Killer Croquet” with our kids before loading up the guns and ammo in the SUV for some target practice out in the woods.
My children had never shot a real gun before and were psyched, especially Tucker. After shooting off a couple of rounds from a 22, knocking down some tin cans, shattering a couple of bottles and hitting a bulls-eye by a hair, you could just see the testosterone coursing through his veins. We couldn’t get him to settle down for hours. Bill blamed it on “the smell of gunpowder through the nostrils being like a drug”.
The climax was getting to fire a 9mm pistol. Bill set up a box with the word “Allied” written across the side. I guess I was shooting like a girl because he coaxed me, “Shoot like someone’s trying to get your children.” That’s all it took, I proceeded to shoot the “L” out of that box!
The girls had to go to the bathroom and were not convinced to go find a bush in the woods so we cleaned up and headed to the Metolius River to feed the trout (and find a real bathroom). We all caught Golden Stoneflies and threw them to the fish under the bridge at Camp Sherman. They hopped up right out of the water and caught them. How cool is that?
Tucker still had not come down from his gunpowder high so we decided it was time to head back to the RV for a nap. Maybe that would calm him down. But first we made a quick stop at the headwaters of the Metolius where the water suddenly appears out of nowhere from the rocks to become a river. This was fascinating to the adults but the kids couldn’t be bothered by this natural phenomenon. They had found a chipmunk and a friend who offered a bag of food to feed Chip and Dale.
After a painfully quick nap we headed over to our friends, Don and Brenda’s, house for dinner. They host the church youth group most Wednesday evenings so I had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with the young people, answering questions about my life and how my heavenly Father helped me through my own teen years.
In the meantime Tucker, Haven and Clancy got to pet baby horses, ride bareback for the first time, go four-wheeling, ride in the back of a pick-up truck and learn to fly-fish in their stocked pond. Tucker asked if he could just stay there for the rest of the trip and write his own book, “Finding God at the Jacobson’s House.”
Posted by weblion at 03:48 PM
