Hoop Fest Spokane

I’ve been trying to walk as many days as possible while we’re sitting here in Spokane.  My normal walk so far has been a little over a mile and a half, but I went with Sandy and Kathy (the Elks RV hosts) the other day and that walk was just over 3 miles.  It’s a little difficult to see them, but there are several turtles along the shoreline and a few in the water near the waterfall in Mirabeau Park which is close to the Elks lodge.

We drove into Spokane to watch our grandson Dominique at the Hoop Fest which is a annual event.  This year there are an estimated 30,000 players making up 7500 teams.  Dominique’s team is called Vanilla Thunder and they won their first game earlier in the day and also won the game we watched them play against the Angry Bananas this afternoon.  I’m not sure where they come up with the team names.  Demetrius who graduated earlier this month was also supposed to be on a team.  However, they signed up as a team of under 6 foot tall players.  When Demetrius entered his height as 6 foot 4 inches on his applications, the red flags were raised and he was eliminated from the competition.

Dominique is in the light colored shorts shooting for the hoop in this photo.

And here’s another shot of him with the ball.

His next game is scheduled for 9:30am on Sunday morning and weather permitting, we’ll probably be headed into town to watch again.

Another Week in Spokane, WA

It’s been a busy week for us.  The Elks lodge is closed on Sundays and Mondays, so we spent those two days with the help of Chris another lodge member getting their new video surveillance system.  Ken and I spent most of the day Saturday running cables from one end of the building to the other.  Chris was a big help to Ken on Sunday in placing the cameras in strategic spots in and outside the lodge.

I volunteered and helped out with the serving line on Taco Tuesday.  We drove the RV to RV’s Northwest at Barker Road Friday morning for our appointment to have the HWH system looked at to determine what would be needed to fix it.  The HWH factory didn’t do too well at returning the technician’s phone calls, so it was around 4pm before we left there with the bad news that we needed a new master control board which would cost us just under $600 plus shipping.  It won’t be sent out until Monday if they have it in stock.  If they don’t have it in stock, they will have to build a new one which will take 3-5 days.  We returned to the Elks and we’ve decided that we’ll be staying here until after the 4th of July holiday now.

Other than all of the above, it’s been the usual routine for us during the week.

Demetrius’ Graduation Party

Saturday, June 9th was the graduation party for Demetrius at our daughter’s home in Nine Mile Falls.  Ken and I went out there a little early so that we could help Laura with some of the preparation work.  Our granddaughter Bailie found these glasses to wear.

And here is Demetrius, the graduate.

Demetrius is standing between Mary Ann and Ron, Ken’s brother and wife.

Bonnie baked a special cake for the party.

Here is Tim with he and Devri’s new addition to their family, a little girl named Quinn.

This is Tim and Devri’s oldest child Cooper.

Dominique is Laura’s youngest son (our other grandson in the Spokane area).

Butch and Bailie were here for the weekend from Cheyenne.  Bailie will be graduating in a couple of years.

Bob’s mother and Devri.

Having a new baby meant a lot of passing her around so we could all have a turn.  Kayley (Demetrius’ girlfriend) and Demetrius holding Quinn.

Brandon is the newest addition to Laura and Bob’s house.

Laura holding baby Quinn.

Ken on the right and his brother Ron on the left.

In addition to the cake Bonnie brought, Demetrius had requested another special dessert.  Dominique, Butch and Demetrius are digging into this special concoction of ice cream sandwiches topped with cool whip, then drizzled with carmel and chocolate sauces.  If that’s not enough, those items are repeated and then sprinkled with a generous portion of chopped pecans.

Devri with Bonnie holding Quinn.

Demetrius is looking on as his dad Bob is holding Quinn.

There were numerous other photos of baby Quinn being held by pretty much everyone at the party, but we’ll stop here.  The food and party was fantastic and went by very quickly.

Before flying back to Denver on Sunday, Butch dropped by to join us for breakfast and to say his goodbyes.

I don’t have any photos for the remainder of this week, but we’ve been kept busy with doctor appointments, picking up supplies for a project Ken is doing for the Elks lodge and also helping out in the Elks kitchen for taco night.  That’s all until my next update!

6/8/2012–Lakeside High School Graduation

Lakeside High School’s 2012 graduation was held at the Spokane Opera House on Friday 6/8/12 at 8:00pm.

We’re proud that our grandson Demetrius received his diploma at this event.

Afterwards, he was the photo opportunity of the evening.  Here is is with his girlfriend Kayley.

And here he is with his proud mother Laura (our daughter).

My next blog update will be of his graduation party at their home on Saturday.

Vancouver to Spokane and What We’ve Been Doing While in Spokane

After leaving the Vancouver Elks, we drove a short distance to the Fred Meyer to take on diesel using our discount card.  We headed south on I-5 to the next exit and then started our trip heading east on Hwy 12.  It was Saturday on Memorial Day weekend and we soon found out that there was a bicycle ride also heading east that added to the congestion on the narrow and winding highway.

We drove along the north side of the Columbia River enjoying the scenery.

We passed many spots with numerous boats fishing either in the river or in the small lakes on the north side of the road.

We drove through several tunnels.

This bridge crosses the river as a connection between Washington and Oregon.

Usually on a nice day you can see several wind surfers out in the river in this area, but we only saw a couple as we passed by.

We took a short break at the former site of Celilo Falls which is now under water due to the many dams built along the Columbia in the 1950’s.

There is also a lot of train traffic along this route.

When we got to Hwy 82, we turned north toward the Tri Cities area.  In Pasco, we stopped at a popular market with truck and RV parking for a lunch break.  We have been stopping at this location several times over the years and have seen it grow from a small roadside produce market to it’s present large building complete with restaurant.  Back on the road we continued driving north and at I-90, we drove east to Spokane.  This photo shows us approaching downtown Spokane.

We continued to the Spokane Valley and are now parked at the Spokane Elks lodge which is Ken’s home lodge and our summer base when not traveling.  Last year there weren’t any marmots to be seen as I recall…something had driven them off.  This year is a different story and there are large amounts of them and we really need to watch where we walk as their homes in the rocks apparently don’t have indoor plumbing.

On Memorial Day we spent the afternoon at our daughter’s home visiting and having barbecued chicken for dinner.  We spent a portion of the day last Tuesday checking our the different RV repair facilities so that we could make arrangements for the repair of our HWH jack and airbag suspension system.  We decided to make the appointment with RV’s Northwest at Barker Rd and I-90, but they can’t get us in until June 22nd.

Demetrius is the grandson who will be graduating on June 8th at the Opera House in Spokane and he’s having a busy week.  He was a part of the cast of a play called “The Vain and the Heartless” at his school Monday night.  He is a natural at acting and we were very impressed.

Felts Field is somewhat close to the Elks lodge and we had several flyovers in the last week by bi-planes.

Ken has been trying to find out the problem with our household refrigerator since the icemaker quit making ice.  It was lodged quite tightly into the woodwork and the wood probably expanded since it’s installation as we moved from AZ to the more humid northwest.  He finally got the refrigerator pulled out enough to see behind it and find that the problem was a hose came out of it’s fitting most likely due to a problem with the water pressure.  He reinstalled the hose making sure it was tighter, turned the water on to the icemaker again.  We’re still waiting and it looks like we may have to call for a service technician to take a look at it.  To be continued.

We are getting a cold spell here in Spokane.  The temperatures have been into the low 40’s overnight and it’s only supposed to be in the 50’s for the next few days.  We’re patiently waiting for some warmer weather.

Still in Vancouver, WA

The technician scheduled to look at our problem with the airbags didn’t show up at 9am…so we waited and finally got word that he would be here a couple of hours late.  He finally arrived at about noon and spent an hour working on the airbags and finally got them fixed to the point where we can travel again.  So…we’ll be looking into repairs to the HWH leveling system when we get back to Spokane.  While outside, Ken spotted a water leak that we needed to check out.  After some research, we discovered a leak from the back of the new residential refrigerator…most likely the ice maker line is the problem.  He shut it down so that wouldn’t continue…but it appears to be too late.  Water has been slowly leaking out from under the refrigerator into the living area and it looks like the subflooring has been saturated.  We’re not happy campers as it looks like there’s going to be some major expenses to get things fixed up again.

On a good note, we plan to head out in the morning and travel to Spokane where we’ll be located for a couple of weeks while attending our grandson’s graduation.  We’re really looking forward to that!

 

5/23–5/24 12–Vancouver, WA

On Wednesday we made plans to meet up with Ken’s distant cousin Donna who is very deeply involved in the genealogy of the Gear family.  On our way north last year, we met her for the first time after Ken had been emailing her for and exchanging files for quite some time.  We had already met up with her about 3 weeks ago in Santa Clara where she and Ken got to see an old family bible dated in the early 1800’s.  Donna was working today so we arranged to go to her house when she got home.  She had picked up a pizza and spinach salad for dinner which we ate when we arrived at her house.  While Ken and Donna got involved in their genealogy research, I visited with Donna’s husband John while watching some tv.  Around 9pm we headed back to the RV for the evening.

This morning we started making our preparations to travel for the day.  We held off eating our normal breakfast because we were expecting Ervin’s wife Kathy to be stopping by with some of her banana bread.  When she arrived, we heated it up in the microwave and it was very good!  Kathy and I visited for a while as Ken finished getting ready to hit the road.  We said our goodbyes to Kathy and I pulled in the slides while Ken went outside to disconnect the power.  After bringing the slides in, I tried to start the HWH jacks control panel….and NOTHING!…no lights on the panel no matter what we tried to do.  Ken made a call to HWH and was able to get instructions to manually store the jacks, but once that task was completed, the RV would not air up.  Ken made a call to Coach Net and explained what was happening and after a few back and forth phone calls, we found that a technician would show up here at 9am on Friday.  Since there wasn’t much we could do about the situation, we decided to go for a drive.  We headed south on I205 and picked up a couple of items at the Home Depot then headed west on the Marine Drive which follows the Columbia River.

There were several large houseboats along the river.

The Portland, OR airport is also adjacent to the Marine Drive and here are a couple of photos of the airport.

On the return trip eastbound I got this shot of the I205 bridge across the Columbia River.

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but we’re hoping that the technician that show up in the morning has a way to work around and air up the RV so that we can travel.  If all goes well, we’ll be on our way to Spokane, WA and plans on looking into repairs while there.  More later….