Saturday 28. I got up and wanted to do something with the crew, something outside of the city is what I had in mind. sometimes I feel as if the buildings, streets, sounds of cars and sirens makes me feel boxed in. Even though Portland is pretty open, and lots of tree's, but I feel like where ever I look there are people. So I need to get out once in a while. Rae was in the mood to organize some things so I took the girls and we found a trail in Forest Park. It was a good walk, a gentle climb for about 30 minutes, and we snacked at some spots. Ivy wanted to go home about 2/3rds of the way up, but I talked to her about all the neat things out there and we started finding different plants and things to see then she took off to the end of the trail. Funny thing as we were getting near the top I heard some sort of buzzing, machine like... Off in the distance. As we got near the end of the trail at the top. It was a lawn mower, the trail end was to some guys driveway to a massive house. Which brought me to a screeching halt of the mental nature walk. Usually forest park is pretty excluded and people live on the outskirts, this particular trail was wedged in from the main road to ritchie rich's driveway in the sky.
After naps we loaded up the cooler and headed out to Oxbow park. Its on the Sandy River and a pretty big park. it again is pretty close to the city, about 10 minutes outside of Gresham. But its a pretty drive, and its on the river. We went to play on the river bank and I thought it was running icewater again, but it was tolerable. so much so that we were all wading to the knees and staying in and the girls were almost fully swimming. We worked on a rock wall (horse shoe shaped) in the river for a while, till we got hungry and we were losing our sun. We packed the bbq and food, so we went to one of the campgrounds with a play structure and grabbed a table and started dinner. The girls played then we ate, then we all played. Sun setting and mosquitos got us packing up. Got home around 9ish. kids went down well. It was a nice day.
