The Bolivians Have Landed!

Happy June! This week has been BUSY!

On Wednesday, Grasshopper, Muskrat and I took off for Portland to stay at Muskrat's mother's house. We stayed in Portland because Grasshopper and his daughter had to fly out of PDX early on Thursday for level two archery training in California, while Muskrat and I would leave later that morning for Newberg to teach a CPR/First Aid/AED/Infant CPR class at a nearby camp. On our way there, Muskrat told shared some experiences she had accumulated over her life. This woman is amazing; I hope I can have half the stories she has someday.

The class was to counselors at a Christian camp, and most were college students. One woman who helped put on the camp talked with me during break, she asked where I was from and told me her husband was from Kansas and his sister taught elementary special education in Hays! Crazy!

After teaching the class, we headed to PDX to pick up the first Bolivian woman that would work at the camp this summer, Ximena. It took us TWO hours to get across Portland because of the traffic (note we left the camp at 3:30 and Ximena's flight was scheduled to arrive at 4:30). When we finally got to the airport at 5:30pm, we looked all over for her, but her flight didn't appear on the arrivals board. We had no idea where she was or where her flight was, luckily, Bug was able to find out her flight had been postponed two hours, so Muskrat and I grabbed some much-conveted supper.

Ximena's flight came in around 7:00pm, and thank goodness her luggage had arrived as well in once piece. We had a few hours to kill (Blueberry and Stephanie's flight wouldn't arrive until 10:30pm), so we drove around Portland and visited all of Muskrat's old hangouts when she was a child. Portland has the largest park within a city (even larger than Central Park) in the world. It's wild. One minute you're driving through upperclass neighborhoods, then you find yourself in heavily wooded forest. Several Oregonian cities have an annual flower festival, and each city is dedicated to a specific flower; for Portland it is the rose. We drove to the rose garden to smell all the flowers and look down on Portland's city lights (well, those lights that weren't blocked by trees). Also, apparently in city parks at night, when the lights are way down low, it's like all the couples in the world come out to make-out. We passed several of these snogging lovers and laughed. Ximena told us in Bolivia when they see people doing that they say, "Don't eat bread in front of the poor!"

After leaving the park, we headed back to PDX. A few days before we went to Portland, I realized I had left my signed copy of "The Fault in Our Stars" on the airplane I had taken from Denver. I checked in with lost and found to see if they had picked it up, but was informed that after like, five hours, they send "useless" objects like that to a giant storehouse in Alabama. Nice.

ANYWAY.

Blueberry and Stephanie arrived safe and sound! We were so happy to see them! We left the airport around 11:30pm, and our amigas were HUNGRY. So we stopped at a 24-hour diner in Salem at midnight, naturally having the waitress take a group picture of us.

I kept Muskrat up on the way home by quoting "Princess Bride" with her to keep her up. We rolled into camp at 2am and crashed HARD. The next morning we ate breakfast at noon.