Various Triumphs of the Summer

Ida's been really working on her bike ride. This one was about 5-6 miles? She had a camera attached to her, too, and perhaps we'll add some of that footage in the near future...

Been out to the beach at Hood River.  Girls are really working on their swimming.

Blueberry picking, non-stop.  Actually, this is a stop.  Post-blueberry picking.

Our friend Lindsay took these two:

That's Glissa the guinea pig, visiting the front yard.

4th / Cape Lookout

After a failed, flawed attack upon the Eastmoreland 4th of July Parade, we got in the moving van and started to travel.

Driven by Foxy Joanie.

In what has become a yearly ritual, we gathered with the Bradford and Cass family.  Ate a bunch of half-cooked dough coiled around sticks.

Most of our time was spent at the beach; we've learned not to take cameras to the beach.  Able to report that Ida has seemingly no sense of cold; she spent much time in the ocean and her skin turned purple.

Back at the campsite, we engaged in some fairly ferocious "Spot It" games.

The Bradford Girls were forced to wear bandanas at all times.

I don't know who had this idea.

Ida vs. Sleep-Away Camp!

Craziness! Ida and Elsie went to overnight camp for two nights last week. Here they are getting ready to go:

This was down in Fossil, as part of an OMSI camp.  It was 99 degrees, a fact the girls were quite proud of.  Ida took a camera along and didn't lose it; she said the batteries ran out, but she did manage to take about a hundred photos, mostly close-ups of fire and many different angles on the same skeletons.  She also likes to "zoom up" on her subject in a way that leaves smeary, out of focus images that are impossible to understand.  That said, here are a few impressions.  This, she says, is "the landscape."

This is the camp.  That may be "Coyote Cabin" where the girls slept.

One of the aforementioned skeletons:

A snake!

Fire!

Here's Elsie in her bunk in Coyote Cabin!  Every single girl got an upper bunk!

They went on a hike and saw moss where if you poured water on it it turned bright green.

Excellent.  The girls would like to go again, and longer.  Despite persistent prodding on my part about whether they got really homesick and cried, they professed real confusion at the concept.  This, my mother-in-law said, is a sign of successful parenting.