Look...NO WALLS!

This weekend we headed down to Oregon. It was a pretty quick trip for just a day of outdoor adventures, but it was fun to hang out with friends and see a new town we hadn't been to yet. We left Friday night for Hood River, OR and got into town around midnight. The group had rented a condo and by the time we got there everyone was already asleep so we tried to sneak in without disturbing too many people. That's a little hard when your bedroom is on the top floor and you have two crazy dogs, one of which can't make it up more than one flight of stairs and the other one that's bouncing off the walls after being in the car for nearly 4 hours!

Saturday morning after a coffee fix down town, most of the group headed off to ride bikes down a mountain. Unfortunately I still haven't gotten to give it a try on an easy ride, so I just got to shuttle everyone to the top of the mountain and spend the rest of the day with the pups. We ended up piling one of the trucks full of 7 people 6 bikes and a dog and trekking it up the mountain. It was a pretty great view from the top and you could see in the distance Mt. Hood which had plumes of smoke coming from it from several on going forest fires. I dropped everyone off and headed back down the mountain to some sleepy puppies in the car. By that time it was pretty hot out so it was probably pretty brutal of me to try to take Ben for a run, but I gave it a try anyway. He lasted a couple of miles before he decided to give up and sit under a tree. By the time everyone got home, they were all pretty exhausted, so we headed over to a little swimming hole in the Columbia River. This time it was Tara's time to shine...hahaha. She jumped right in and did a few little swims out to the middle of the swimming hole and was more excited about swimming than the other pups. We're still working on getting Ben to voluntarily swim, but he's not quite there yet. It felt great to dip in the water though after a long hot day. After dinner we headed back on the road to get back to Seattle in the wee hours in the morning.

Sunday Ryan had a photo shoot most of the day at one of his recently completed houses. They're trying to get some good proffessional photos for an award submission. I can't wait to see how they turn out! Taking a break from that we went over to our new house too! I hadn't seen it in a week and I was shocked to see how much had happened! We have no walls anymore! They reinforced the roof and tore down all the interior walls and fixtures of all sorts, so now we pretty much have a big open room. We can also see a lot better how much patchwork has gone into the house. We're definitely going to have to patch up a lot of the drywall that the walls had covered before and a few spots in the floors as well. Hopefully this week they'll be able to start putting up new walls and the new plumbing and electrical. I can't wait to see what it looks like next weekend! Here's a little photo progression of the last few weeks: