2 Days Down...

In case you were wondering, we successfully made it to Portland and then to Longview, WA. The flights were relatively uneventful, except for the large numbers of small children on the second leg of the flight. I have never seen that many kids on an airplane at one time. Even more annoying, was the number of poor parents accompanying said children. Yikes. I'm sure dealing with a 5 year old boy and an 11 year old boy on a 3 hour flight is not easy...but some things should go without saying. Such as the fact that alternately ignoring and then slapping kids for certain behaviors is not effective discipline. Yeah, I know I'm not a parent yet, but some things don't take a rocket scientist (hi honey!) or an advanced parenting degree.

Anyway, we got to Longview by about 1 p.m. (PDT) Of course, the hotel was not ready for us to check in yet, so we decided to go exploring. We drove west on Hwy. 30 and stopped in a really cute small town called Astoria and wandered around their Sunday market. We bought some Ranier cherries, blueberries, and raspberries to snack on. Then we continued driving. We drove to Seaside, which incidentally, is right on the Pacific Ocean. We visited the beach, and the ocean. Seaside is also the end of the Lewis & Clark trail, so there is a monument there too. This is interesting because the Lewis & Clark trail also goes through Kansas City, and I recall seeing signs for it when Steven and I were up in KC for me to catch my flight. Luckily, it didn't take us as long to get all the way from Kansas to the Pacific Ocean as it did Lewis & Clark!

The scenery is awesome, which was pretty much expected. The weather is also great. No 99 degree temperatures here! We could see Mt. St. Helens as we were driving up to Longview, although while we are in the town (in the valley) we can't actually see it because of the hills/mountains. I am definitely planning to go up to one of the observatories while I'm here.

Oh, the Spanish classes, you say? Yeah, well, we've had 2 days so far and it has been almost entirely review for me. I've picked up a few things here and there. It's also nice to be able to freely practice speaking with other people who are not concerned about mistakes. I don't think I've improved much yet, but I'm sure I'll be somewhat improved by the end of the class. Looking at the syllabus, I don't think we are going to cover anything that is really new to me, although some of the topics I probably didn't learn thoroughly in the past. We shall see. But I'm definitely not having a problem keeping up so far, which is nice.

Other than that, I don't have much news. The only other things I could tell about are not necessarily "bloggable." We shall see.