They predicted a wet weekend, and since Doug and Brenda are in Arizona, we went golfing on Wednesday and Thursday this week, and James will work Saturday instead.
(He golfs every Tuesday-evening too by the way, with the men's team, so he's getting enough golf in to keep him happy!)

 

I probably should golf a little more too since I'm doing absolutely terrible at the moment. For the life of me, I can't seem to hit a decent ball anymore!

                                    

                                    Putting is about the only thing I'm OK at these days ..

Since I'm only playing nine holes I'd not made it to the back nine yet, but there was a gap between players and we were finally allowed to start from the 10th hole.
To me, the back seemed a little shorter and maybe a tad easier, but I still managed to miss-hit almost every shot, and even loose a few balls in the water and the rough. @!#$^%!

Any-who .. moving on. Afterwards we went to the Wednesday market in town:

They started somewhere in May but we kept forgetting and/or the weather wasn't cooperating, so this was our first time there.
I was pleasantly surprised at how many booths there were for such a small town!

                           

Although I had hoped there was a little bit more of farmer's-food-market theme going on, there was a wide variety of products available, including produce.



And how about this old fire truck which they changed into a real wood-fired pizza oven!

 

'For damsels in distress' :



And also something to de-stress. Hemp oil! It's a thing now in Oregon!
CBD (cannabidiol) products are well on their way to becoming a great alternative to traditional medicines used for a variety of ailments. 
 

                                                 

Derived from the Hemp plant instead of the Marijuana plant, the concentration of CBD is apparently so small in these tinctures that you don't really get high from this oil, but it does have a calming effect and can reduce inflammation and pain.
We'd actually been thinking about putting Merlin on it for the arthritis in his hips, so next time I'll probably buy some.
(And hey, a little sip every now and than might calm my nerves and those 'old-age pains' too!)



After walking around for an hour or so we walked over to the food court, about two blocks down the street from the market.
We'd been wanting to try out these food trucks for a while now too, so this was the perfect day for it!

We tried some Lumpia's at Hunny Beez and one of our favorite dishes at any Mexican restaurant, Chili Rellenos, at Gran Victoria ..

                            

I'd high hopes for the Lumpias since it's a very popular, Indonesian type of spring-roll dish in Holland, but unfortunately these very very disappointing and just your basic crunchy American-chinese spring-rolls.
They were over-cooked on top of that and even the side dishes were rather tasteless.
Oh well, now we know what not to get!

Let's see, what else? My garden is finally starting to grow, now the weather is more consistently on the warmer side (although last week was rather cool).



Look there's my one (yes, hilarious!) broccoli! And a few strawberries: 

 

And my first harvest of (leaf)/spinach/arugula mix and some pretty, colorful rainbow-chard!

I'm so proud! Those lettuces made a nice salad with some very nice bacon wrapped beef tenderloins from the grill and sweet potato fries!
              

And there you have it. Another week done and over with. So far the state of Oregon is fitting us just fine!

 

 

At Cape Meares

We went for a beautiful drive along the coast this Memorial Day!
Mostly because the weather was gorgeous, and James wanted to make up for the 'week at the beach that never happened' when we came up from Arizona, but also because we're starting to check out areas that we might want to move to, after we leave Newberg somewhere in the future.
(I know, that's still like 2 years away, but better too early than too late .. or something like that).

We first had to drive west, to the coast (Lincoln City), which takes about an hour, and from there we went north. First stop, the town of Neskowin.
Apparently James used to have an uncle who lived there more than 50 years ago and he had been there to visit as a youngster.

We drove through town, parked the car and walked straight onto the beach. What a beautiful sight!

               

It was quite a bit cooler here than inland, probably about 10 degrees and mostly because of the (light) sea-breeze but we sat down to have coffee (and my home-made Strawberry-rhubarb pie) ..
This is looking North: 

Neskowin itself is about the cutest sea-side town I have ever seen, and I've seen quite a few the last 10 years!
It's only 2 blocks wide and the roads are very narrow, the houses are tiny but all  incredibly beautiful and different and sort of cape-cod style.

                             

Off course we had to check out the 9-hole public golf course. They had just opened 8 holes for the season and were still working on drying out the 9th.  Apparently they have a tendency to flood ..

Their rates are cheap though: $15 for 9 holes! Now that's more like it!

OK. This tiny town is definitely a contender for our future residence!
Moving on. Driving further north we split of the 101 and took the scenic 'beach-road', which keeps you closest to the ocean.

We passed several bays, where hordes of people were out clamming. Apparently it being Memorial Day brought whole families to the coast ..

I definitely want to try my hand on this one time. It looks like fun ..

We past Oceanside:

                                      

And a couple of miles after that we drove into Cape Meares National Forest ...

                       

We'd hoped to 'round the cape' and drive to Tillamook from the other side, but it turned out that that road has closed a couple of years ago, so the cape is as far as you can go.

    

The view from here is stunning!

There's a cute little lighthouse at the point ..

And it's a popular breeding spot for all three Cormorrants, Mures and Tufted Puffins.

After retracing our steps for a couple of miles , we drove the 9 miles inland to Tillamook, where we had some fish and chips at a roadside food-truck.
Next time we will explore the area north of Tillamook, but for now we had enough and made our way back home, taking the 22 this time, a small, very windy cut-off road, which turned out to be very pretty, but had nothing to add to our 'possible places to stay'.

And while we made the trip in the truck, which does fine, next time we will be using our 'new-to-us' Subaru: 

Ain't she pretty? The car, I mean .. not bad for 15 years old! It has very low mileage and we got it for dirt-cheap, so we're happy campers!
We even have a carport to store it under. Sweet!

James is still working on restoring the damage from our little mishap with the RV. It's a slow process because he had to wait for parts and for warm and dry weather, but he's almost there!

And look at that, we bought a small freezer for in our 'shed', under the front of the RV ..

                                   
 

It fits just fine and now I can finally have a pizza or two in stock (they don't fit in the RV's freezer), and freeze the fruit and veggies that are hopefully coming from our garden!

Talking about fruit, I made a rhubarb-strawberry pie (from rhubarb that's growing in Doug's yard) for Memorial Day:

I was pleasantly surprised how well it came out. No sloppy mess, but a neat little pie, sweet and tart, just perfect!

OK, and that's all she wrote for this week folks! See you next time!

This last week we finally got some 'normal' Oregon weather .. cool, overcast, cloudy and even some good rain! Oh well, it had to catch up on us someday ..


But the biggest news for this week has, off course, to be this:

                                                               

Yup! Those are tickets! To Holland! Yahoo!
I'm finally allowed in, but only because I have a dutch passport, and I don't need a 'compelling' reason anymore.
I'm flying with Iceland Air, who has very cheap tickets on certain dates, and I will have a 1,5 hr lay-over in Reykjavík, before landing in Amsterdam after a total flight of 12 hrs. Not bad! And because I booked with the airline itself, I can change my ticket (if something happens) for free! Better safe than sorry these days ...
So, great news off course, and fortunately everybody in Holland seems to be happy that I'm coming so that's always nice too!

I also don't have to go in quarantine anymore when I arrive because I'm no 'fully vaccinated'!

Yes!! We got our second shot of Moderna yesterday:

                      

In two more weeks we will have reached full immunity and we will be invincible! Well .. sort of ..

OK, all other news is just peanuts of course, but I'll still show some stuff from this last week, just because ..
Here are some more pics of what I come across during my daily walks here in the neighborhood:

Lots of pretty 'little' farms and quite some bigger ones .. and I'm getting to know lots of cute and pretty livestock too ..

Quite a few come over to the fence by now to get a scratch behind the ears. Maybe I should  start carrying some treats and I bet I'll be really in demand!
Although, once you start ..

This guy often hangs out at the barn on our property:

Red-breasted Sapsucker

For some reason he likes to hammer not on the wood on the left, but on the metal pipe on the right! It's very loud and I can't help thinking that it should hurt his beak, or at least his head!

Everything seems to flower at the moment, especially the roses and the early clematis:

   

      

And how about these Peonies?

  

Perfection!

Encouraged by my bread-baking succes of late, I baked some more. This is a half wheat/half white 'normal' kneaded sandwich bread and a sort of braided baguette:

Again, they came out pretty good! Just for the smell you will want to bake your own bread ... absolutely heavenly! James couldn't resist (of course) to steal the two end-pieces right away!

He himself made breakfast on Sunday. Now he has such a nice new guy-toy, he's totally getting into this. I'm not complaining!

Pouring eggs for scrambling ..