Going for a Drive

When we woke up yesterday morning and saw all the various chores that needed to be done around the house and outside, we didn’t want to do any of them. We decided we were going to take the dog and go for a road trip instead.

Our reason for leaving was the Rainier Junior & Senior High School students and volunteers were putting on a reenactment of life in Rainier during the Civil War in what they called Rainier Revisited 1853. It happened to be going on where my partner grew up in Goble, Oregon at the Beaver Homes Grange, so we decided why not, it’d be good to get out of the house and do something.

At first the weather was not so cooperative as it changed from sunny to cloudy to rainy to overcast to scattered showers to sunny and repeated this pattern in no particular order for most of the morning and early part of the afternoon. However, eventually the sun made a more permanent appearance and stayed out for the remainder of the day, which was excellent since a majority of the activities were outdoors.

After about an hour at the Rainier Revisited 1853 exhibit, we took a drive along the unpaved roads of Goble to check out what had changed and what had remained the same since my partner lived there, driving by where he and various family members used to live. We took the back roads to the highway and decided to head back in home’s direction, figuring we had to St. Helens and stop by Dari-Delish to get a dipped cone before leaving the area, and ended up having lunch there too in what is a very 50s style drive-in restaurant complete with a neon sign. Lucy devoured her small kid’s cone and waited not so patiently for us to drop any fragments of our ice cream onto the ground.

As we were leaving St. Helens I noticed a quilt shop and mentioned that I didn’t know they had one there, and my partner quickly turned back to check it out as he has been wanting to make a traditional Americana quilt for years now and has yet to find fabric that he’s satisfied with. The store is called Fibers & Stitches (http://fibersandstitches.com/) and they had not only a really excellent selection of quality fabrics, but the staff was incredibly helpful and knowledgeable and within only a matter of minutes my partner had a Layer Cake of Moda fabric with vintage charm perfect for the quilt he wanted to make. Unable to not buy anything when inundated with such beautiful fabric, I saw a wide selection of Moda Jelly Rolls and some were packaged as scrap for nearly a third of the price as the regular ones because they were from the end of the fabric where the color code and fabric line is located, and got a package to make a nine patch quilt with. I highly recommend you check them out if you are in the area, or if you feel like taking a drive.

We continued our trek East on Highway 30 towards Portland and decided to go to Sauvies Island and drive around it. Well, you can’t actually drive all the way around the Island on one road, but you can get pretty close to it from a couple different ones. As we drove I noticed a sign for an herbary and wanted to check them out to see if they had any basil starts as I had been fairly unsuccessful in locating any. We pulled into Blue Heron Herbary (http://blueheronherbary.com/) and immediately were struck with how cute the garden areas were. While my partner went to check out the gift shop, I was on a quest for herbs, and was quickly greeted by the sales lady with a tray to put any plants I may find in while I looked around and told me everything was in alphabetical order. I was blown away at the sheer amount of varieties they had and I kid you not, they have 85 different kinds of lavender. However, my quest for basil seemed to be in vain until I got back to the beginning and noticed that those all started with “C” and as I craned my head there was a whole table of basils to be perused. Me being me, I couldn’t decide between the seven varieties they had available, so I picked five of them, each for different reasons. If they also had Thai Basil I would have gotten that too, but I didn’t see any. The gift shop is filled with herbs and soaps and various teas and garden ornamentations and they let their eleven Serema chickens free range around the gardens and adjoining yard, which the five roosters they had were absolutely gorgeous and they had the cutest little crow from their miniature frame.

After we left the Blue Heron Herbary, we continued our drive around the island and turned around at the parking lot for the nude beach and made our way back home. Sometimes just taking a tour of your own area can be a really relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and who knows, you may find new places you didn’t know existed to tell your friends about.