Family Vacation Time!

Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula are among our favorite places to vacation.

Currently Mark and I are vacationing on at Port Townsend, Washington State.  It has been a great seven days celebrating 40 years of marriage to my wonderful husband.  Now it is time to return to “real life”.  I thought I would make an entry about all our "getaways" through the years.

Putting finishing touches on the Trimaran "PT Eagle".  

One happy memory is of our boys making homemade sailboats from driftwood to launch before leaving our condo at Kala Point.  Mark certainly outdid himself in making the biggest and best trimaran ever to sail from the shores of Kala Point!

The historic sites included the Heber J. Grant Library at BYU.

I was thinking about our family vacations when I was growing up.  I pulled up some pictures of our family trips and remembered how these were times when our family bonded.  Somehow we fit up to 11 of us into our station wagon and survived the trip. One time we took a trip all the way to Indiana to visit relatives there.  We also went to historic locations, including the BYU Heber J. Grant Library to see where Mom and Dad first met.

The car broke down on our way through Yellowstone (1963?).  No problem, we got to stay a day longer while the car was repaired!

Having the small, packed 13 foot trailer made it easy on a Friday night to just hop in and head to the Oregon Coast after Dad's last patient at Willamette View Chiropractic Center. Stopping at the Astoria Column to drop our shoes from the top of the platform (164 steps up!) was a great memory. 

Likely 1969 outside of Willamette View Chiropractic Center

1963-Uncle Albert's House in Indiana.

1963 trip to Indiana

Mt. Rushmore was one stop on the 1963 trip.

Visiting the Lincoln, Nebraska Cemetery where my Grandfather and other family members are buried. 1963.

I also remember the vacations we took as a family with our own children.  It is actually a pretty amazing thing that we actually took as many “vacations” as we did.  Every April when public schools scheduled “spring break” we would head out camping, rain or shine.  Many times it was for Ft. Stevens State Park on the Oregon Coast.  One year the Portnoy's joined us and we roasted around the biggest driftwood fire ever built near the Peter Iredale shipwreck.   Sometimes we went north to Skagit County and enjoyed the tulip fields as we made our way north.  With eleven of us, it was always a challenge to get packed and out of town.  Daddy would usually drive up to join us midweek in a separate car. 

We were experiencing an April downpour in the 1980's and Mark decided it was time to buy a pop-up tent trailer.  Our $1200 Rockwood trailer slept 8-13 (depending on the age and size of children) served us well for about 15 years.  In fact, we eventually tore off the leaking canvas top and used the framework as a utility trailer for many years.

I'll never forget when we set up our tent-trailer at Sequim Bay State Park #80 overlooking the Bay from our plastic "picture window".  It was an amazing camping spot and the baseball field through the tunnel under the highway added to the adventure.  Trips to the big game animal farm in Sequim and Dungeness Spit kept us busy when it rained.  Bayview State Park and Deception Pass State Park also had campsites with gorgeous views on the Puget Sound.

Owen Family Reunions every other summer “forced” us to take vacation time off.  It did begin to feel like we always drove to Utah and that the Utahans didn’t seem to come to the Northwest much!  We drove a 1989 blue Chevy Suburban that didn’t have air conditioning.  We would take water bottles and “mist” ourselves to make the trip bearable.   Great family gatherings with cousins were memory makers for our children.  (See “Reunions” post from July 9, 2014.)

XXX  (Suburban-loaded with all the bicycles on the aluminum frame.)

One exceptional trip was in 1996 when we joined with two of my sister’s families and did a cross country historical journey seeing LDS Church history sites and US history sites.  We gutted a 1974 GMC motorhome and rebuilt it.  We planned to put a new engine in it in Colorado, and headed out to join the others in Nauvoo, Illinois.  Of course, we were delayed and had engine problems all along the way, but Mark was blessed with amazing patience and we babied the old motorhome along and created tons of memories for our family.  Surprisingly, the KOA campground swimming pool became the best motivator to get our camp set up so that all the cousins could splash around together before dinner was served.

XX (yellow bananamobile)

In 2002 we went back to Nauvoo for the Open House for the Nauvoo Temple.  It was a wonderful to spend more time in Nauvoo enjoying the sites were didn’t have time for in 1996 when we were there.
Mark and I had amazing “vacations” as we went to pick up our missionary sons and daughters at the conclusion of their LDS missions.  We were able to see where our children served, meet those who meant so much to them, and usually take with us another child.  These trips took us to Chile, Brazil, California, Taiwan, Ecuador, Germany, and Argentina.  I have notebooks full of memories from these wonderful vacations.

Looking out toward the Puget Sound from the deck at Kala Point.

Kala Point Village hasn't changed much in the past 20 years.

Throughout the years, Kala Point Village  near Port Townsend, WA has been one of our favorite places to stay.  The Weiss Company owned the condo and we would come across the Washington State Ferry on our assigned week to Unit #23 twice a year.  We learned all the great places to hang out and watched as the skate park was built and other changes came to the area.

Mark and I would frequently take a weekend to go to the Oregon Coast.  Having clam chowder at Mo's restaurant was always part of the trip to the Cannon Beach.  Flying kites and walking around town and just enjoying sitting at the waves edge and rehydrating. 

XXX
Mo's selfie

The most amazing vacation ever was our trip in Spring of 2015 to the Holy Land with Craig and Sandy Ostler and many Weiss and Owen family members.  We had a glorious experience that has impacted my daily scripture reading.  As someone else pointed out, now I can almost see in “Technicolor” the locations where ancient historical events took place where before I saw only “black and white”.

XXX
Pic. from Israel.


While a vacation is supposed to be a stress free time, it can become stressful, as pointed out in this article:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765676841/How-to-keep-your-dream-vacation-from-becoming-a-nightmare.html
James Fang, M.D., is a cardiologist with University of Utah Health Care. Fang’s best advice for vacations?
“Take more of them,” he said. “Vacations relieve stress. They’re good for relationships, and that is good for the heart.
They’re also great for everyone’s mental health. We could all use more vacations. You just have to be careful about overindulging, overeating and overdoing it physically.”

And so our lovely vacation to the Northwest ends.  I am thankful for our little Coleman tent trailer that sits beside our house reminding us to take another break and go camping up Logan Canyon!

XXX  Lil Bull