Trip to Oregon -- with newts!
So, the entire trip to Oregon was pretty awesome. Except for the packing. For whatever reason every time we had to pack or consider packing or move luggage I got all stressed out. But happily, that only made up a tiny portion of the trip.

We took a little commuter train from Grand Rapids into Chicago at a ridiculous hour in the morning the first day. But this meant that we had a long layover in Chicago, so my sister came down and met us at the station. She grabbed us a cab and we went out for lunch at a great little Mexican restaurant across the street from a Trader Joe's, where we stocked up on food for the train. (vegetarian sushi! brie and mini baguettes! apples! cookies! all much better and mostly cheaper than the offerings in the snack car.)

Then it was back to the train station. We took the Empire Builder out to Portland. There was a little girl in the seat behind Jefferson and another little girl a few rows back. They mostly just tolerated him following them around until he showed them his baby doll, and then he was adopted as one of the gang. (I bought him a baby doll that he fell in love with at Target right before the trip as his new toy for the train. It seriously increased his train popularity.) In particular he made friends with the little girl behind us, and they sat in his seat and watched Madagascar on my laptop. It was adorable. Sadly, she got off in the middle of the last night at Spokane, so when he woke up in the morning and said "I want my friend!" and she wasn't there... Tears were shed. :(

But then we got off of the train a few hours later in Portland. We took a cab to the Hertz office and dumped all of our bags in the car, then went to wander around downtown in search of lunch. We ended up at an all-vegetarian Chinese restaurant, which had awesome food, but had this strange Buddhist vegetarian propaganda channel on a huge screen behind our table. It was very strange.

Anyway! Fast forward to camp! We drove down to Camp Myrtlewood, which was supposedly supposed to be a four hour drive or so, but I swear it didn't take that long. (We made a bunch of stops, though, so I can't say for sure.) John, who directs the camp with his wife, Margaret, came out to greet us and help us get settled into our cabin, which was very nice. The next day we were pretty much the only guests for most of the day, so we got drawn right in. John asked Andrew and I to arrange and hang some framed pictures in the dining hall (where construction was just recently completed), and later Andrew went off with the BVS kids to go haul hay for one of camp's neighbors. So by the time the rest of of the OMA folks started showing up, we were thoroughly entrenched.

The conference was easily the best of the conferences I've been to so far. Not only was it at Camp Myrtlewood, which is just crazy beautiful, but I think it had the best balance of free time and conference sessions, the spiritual retreat sessions were on Celtic spirituality, which is just a perfect mix both for camp environments and for my own bizarre little personal theology. Also, we had an organized craft (papermaking), numbers seemed up from past conferences, and the vegetarian food was awesome -- I never felt like a second-class guest.

Plus, not to slur any of the hosts for past conferences, but John and Margaret are just so incredibly hospitable. It was such a pleasure to spend time at their camp.

Each conference tends to involve one outside trip, and this was a good one (aside from the motion sickness). We drove out to Grassy Knob National Wilderness (in a ridiculous 15 passenger bus. I spent most of the time concentrating on not being sick. happily, someone traded a spot in a car with me after we got to the Fish Hatchery to pick up our guide). We got to spend some time exploring the forest in the morning, then we all gathered for a sack lunch and then drove back to Banyan, which is on the coast. Each vehicle group was allowed to decide what they wanted to do, we were just given a time to get back to camp for a dinner of gourmet pizza. I was FREEZING in the wind at the ocean, so I was very happy when my group decided to only spend 15 minutes there before going into town to check out the shops. Where I learned a bitter lesson -- all Oregon coastal towns have at least one shop that claims BEADS, but mostly they mean a single rack of gemstone chips. Sad.

The next day there was a hike up to Vista Point. Andrew and I arranged that Andrew would watch/carry Jefferson on the way up, and I would get him on the way back. But then Jefferson decided to bail about halfway up, starting back down the trail and telling Mike that he was going back to the kitchen. I considered grabbing him and hauling him back up to Andrew, but then decided to take the path of least resistance and just go back with him. Which at least meant we could go at our own pace and stop to take pictures without holding up the rest of the group. It was nice, Jefferson even caught two newts! Each one he'd pick up and carefully turn it over again and again to see their orange bellies as they'd struggle to right themselves. But he was very gentle, and put them back down before he exhausted them. But that set the timer to get back, as the newts are poisonous and I wanted to get him back to the kitchen to wash his hands before he managed to get them in his mouth. As it turned out, it was very good that we turned back early, as the rest of the hikers didn't get back until after dark. A few people even set back out with flashlights to find the other group which was still out. Coming down the trail in the dark was hard enough, according to Andrew -- I'm very grateful I didn't have to do it with Jefferson!

Anyway, that's mostly the conference. Except at the business meeting, I seem to have volunteered myself for the OMA steering committee -- a three-year position. Hrm. Maybe we will end up at camp longer than I had thought.

The conference broke up Thursday after breakfast, and Andrew and I decided to find a little day trip we could take from camp, then leave for Portland the next morning. When John discovered I'd briefly been a marine biology major in college, he told us we HAD to go out to Coos Bay and Cape Arago. It was absolutely beautiful. Somehow, despite having taken that May-term course on the Pacific Coast, with that roadtrip that included the coast from San Francisco up to Washington, on that one day at Cape Arago I saw more wild marine mammals than my entire May-term trip. Including a juvenile elephant seal who we thought was injured at the time (Andrew later read something at the Aquarium that made him think its lethargic behavior was not out of the ordinary for a juvenile).

In the morning we loaded up the car and drove back out to Coos Bay to head up the coast on the 101. Where I discovered a real bead store (yay!) on our way to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, our destination for the day. The Aquarium was very nice (I'd put it at #4 on my list of best aquariums in the country), but didn't take as long as I'd expected, so I felt a little bad about rushing Andrew up the coast and not letting him stop at any of the beaches. But then some idiot took out a couple of power poles on the 101 with their car (which we thankfully heard about on the radio as we were stopping for dinner at an amazing Thai place in Newport), and the detour we had to take to get around it was a pretty big time-suck, so by the time we made it into Portland to find a hotel we were pretty exhausted.

In the morning, I discovered that the idea I'd gotten into my head about our train leaving at 10:30 was totally wrong -- it didn't leave until 4:45! So we had unexpected hours of grace for lower stress packing and even time to play! Immediately I knew where we had to go. At the Hertz place on our first day we'd seen a flyer for the Portland Children's Museum -- their special exhibit this month was Bob the Builder! Which was so perfect for Jefferson that I was actually feeling guilty about choosing the Aquarium for the day before. But now we got to go! And it was awesome. The coolest Children's Museum I've ever been to. Jefferson had a BLAST, and cried when we finally had to leave (until we got him back into the car and plied him with Oreos). Jefferson's favorite parts: two areas where you could stick balls into vacuum tubes and they would be sucked in to various things (one was a representation of a water pump, the other was just for fun), and two areas with shredded rubber tires and big dump trucks and front loaders to haul the "gravel" around.

Anyway, finally we had to get back on the train. We got on shortly before dark, and I was pleasantly surprised to wake up in the Glacier Mountain National Park area. On the trip out we'd passed through the mountains at night and missed seeing them all, and I'd misread the schedule and thought we'd miss it on the way back as well. It was so beautiful! (I think I'm starting to repeat myself, I talked about the train stuff in a previous post.)

And now we're home! Though we're shortly to head to Indiana for an overnight at Camp Mack. The Mack staff were harassing us at the conference about the fact that we kept promising to visit and still hadn't made it down, until finally I said, so how about the first week of December?

Anyway, pictures of the trip are now in my flickr account. Lots of pictures of Jefferson, of course, but also lots of pictures of mushroom and fungus! They were everywhere at camp! :)