Weekend in Portland

This past weekend Aaron and I headed on our quarterly(ish?) pilgrimage to Portland, Oregon. We timed this visit so that we would be there for our nephew Carson's 2nd birthday. Lucky for us he was born right near Mother's Day, so we also got to spend Mother's Day with my mom.

We arrived Thursday evening after a full day of work, so we pretty much just hit the hay when we arrived at Jason & Amy's place. Friday was just a hang out day. Jason and Aaron spent some time cleaning up the backyard in preparation for Saturday's BBQ and Amy and I spent some quality time with Carson. We rounded out the day by meeting Nate, Amanda, and my mom for dinner.

The big party was Saturday - lots of family and a couple of friends came over to BBQ and celebrate Carson's day. He is such a cute little guy! He learned how to ride his motorized 4 wheeler. He's pretty funny about it too... riding it forward in a pretty straight line and then rather than steering/turning, once he gets to the other side of the yard (or once he ran smack into the side of the house!) he gets off and pushes the car back to the beginning and rides again. So cute!!

After the party we went back to my mom's place so we could wake up there and spend Mother's Day with her. Worked out pretty well! Our long time family friends, the Reitmeiers, came over for a 'picnic.' The original plan to go out to a local winery for a picnic got switched out since we weren't confident about the weather. After the picnic my mom, Aaron, and I drove through a north east neighborhood on a hunt for open houses. Go figure that no one was hosting any due to the holiday. But we still drove the streets and picked up fliers for homes that looked interesting. We're not looking to buy, just looking to look.

Our flight home on Sunday evening actually had a bit of excitement. As we were taxiing out to take off, some guy sitting near the wing *swore* he saw a flame. Uuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrcccccccchhhhh!!! (That's the sound of the plane screeching to a halt.) I counted at least 9 or 10 fire trucks and a couple of police cars that came out to the rescue. Apparently, once we had stopped for several minutes, which allowed the sun to set to a different angle, the guy that thought he saw a flame realized that it was actually the reflection of the sun. Doh!! Too late though. We still had to turn around and go back to the gate so that the maintenance people could do their thing. Turns out that all said and done we were only delayed by about an hour. But good Lord, we were so sick of sitting on that plane by the end of it! So happy to land in LA and get home!

More photos from the weekend are here.