Lincoln City, Oregon

Danks Family Reunion

August 3rd
We arrived in Portland around 9:30am and got our rental car and followed Gary and Kelly to a home show that they read about in the Alaska Airlines magazine. Its called Street of Dreams. This show had 6 homes to view and I fell in love with one of the homes kitchen. It was good to see them because I am missing the SLC Parade of Homes this year and I needed to be refreshed on some of my ideas.
We continued on our drive to the west coast to Lincoln City about 2 hours away from Portland. It was a beautiful drive and the scenery was spectacular with all the lush greenry. We arrived at our Motel and got settled in and went out to buy groceries because we had a kitchen in our room. The weather wasn't like anything that we had packed for. It was cold and very windy but we managed with our light jackets. We ate out that night at a Mexican resturant and it was actually pretty good, the rice and beans, I mean.

August 4th
Each morning we got to make ourselves a nice breakfast because of our kitchen it was very convenient. Then headed off to the outlet mall and met up with Gary and Kelly and saw Brian and Rashanda and Grandma Ardee and Papa John. After shopping we stopped and got lunch and went to the movie theatre to watch "Barnyard." The girls did okay in the movie but Paetan is usually the squirmy one towards the end so I had to go out with her but overall it was a cute movie.
After the movie we went to Candy and Dave's beach house to met everyone. We had good casual conversation and I memorized all the 11 children and ages. Missy and Randy and Don and Teri were there also. So we all were at the beach house and had a spaghetti dinner and chatted some more.

August 5th
Today I went running with Kelly along the beach and it felt really good to get out again but towards the end my knee was bothering me again. Its so frustrating! We got our things together to head off to the lake for the day. We met up with everyone wearing our teal blue reunion shirts at the park by the lake and it was quite the park and its a good thing we all had the same shirts on so that we could find eachother. I went out for the first time on a tube behind the boat persuaded by Brian and Rashanda. But the good thing about it was that Rashanda followed after me which is a BIG deal because she doesn't like the water and we got her out their. She loved it but was also scared but she just laughed off her fear.
We took a big group picture on the playground and can't wait to get a copy of it. This day was very kicked back and relaxing just hanging out in camping chairs and all of them recalling memories of times past. Thats what reunions are for and it was a great time hearing all the things that they remembered from years ago.
That night after dinner we met back up at the beach house and had a big birthday party for everyone because we aren't usually there for eachothers so we decided to have one for all of us.

August 6th
Sunday morning we went to the Lincoln City Ward and we realized that it was Fast Sunday when we got there. But I felt a prompting to get up and share my brief testimony with my family. Then we left because our girls were out of hand. We went back to our motel so that the girls could take a nap and then went back to the beach house for the rest of the day and played by the cliff by the beach. We watched "The Secret" with Grandma Ardee and Papa John. Talked about our pregnancies with Candy and Missy and Kelly. We headed back to the motel to pack up our bags for our return home.

August 7th
Today was Kelly's birthday and we returned home today. We left around 9am and got to the car rental place at 11:30 and went to the airport and ate lunch because we had time to kill. Our plane didn't leave until 1:50 so we went to our gate and got on the plane at 1:00 and our boarding pass said that we didn't get to board until 1:20 so we were a little confused and then an attendent came to ask to see our passes and told us we were on the wrong plane. They changed gates during the time we got checked in until the time we got to the gate. Luckily it was the next gate over. It was kind of funny and I was glad that we weren't on the plane waiting forever.