December 23

After 3 days of being housebound, Jessi and I struck out on foot to Gresham. Our neighbor came by just as we were leaving the driveway and drove us in. He dropped us off on Powell and from there we went to pick up a few things from WINCO for Christmas dinner and then over to Fred Meyer for some last minute things and of course we had to have lunch while we were in town. It was a fun day. The walk home (almost 2 hours) took us about twice as long as it normally would with stops to take pictures and adjust the backpack Jessi was carrying. (no, Jessi...we still have not used the 10 pounds of potatoes I thought we had to have)

John and Rachel decided to take advantage of the break in weather on Tuesday afternoon and drive on up a day early. The snow on the Interstate had piled up and made tracks so deep that the cars were high centering. The highway had to be closed on one side at a time to de-ice and had backed traffic up from Portland all the way to Salem. Instead of having dinner with us, they pulled over in Woodburn and ate and put on chains and then took Hwy 99 on up instead. Their drive ended up taking them 6 hours instead of the usual 1 hour!!! They could not make it up our hill into our drive so we walked to the bottom and helped them carry their things up.