USA Trip Day 14

Sunday, August 14th. 

We had Sylvain's favorite American breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and fried garden potatoes. Afterwards, while the girls were out front with Dad picking basil for pesto, I noticed a chicken out of the pen, walking past the lavender. I asked Dad if it was one of his and if it was supposed to be out. It was and it wasn't. It headed across the street toward the neighbors' house and disappeared around the end of the fern hedge behind the mailboxes. Laureva and Dad each went around each end of the hedge. No chicken. After a few seconds of confusion, Dad noticed some rustling in the ferns. He looked in and found the chicken. He picked her up and found a nest with an egg in it. We initially thought she must have just laid the egg in the space of the thirty seconds we'd lost sight of her. But the nest seemed pretty established and the egg was cold. Dad later realized that she must have laid the egg Friday or Saturday and gone back to the same place to lay another egg, but he picked her up and put her back in the pen before she could. He and Laureva went down to look and found today's egg in the coop.

The girls and Grandpa occupied the rest of the morning making pesto, pouring honey into jars (they got about 7 pints total). We also did the Tromble Hangout and Coatney Chaos webcam events.

After a light lunch of yogurt, honey and granola, we headed out for the Colombia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles, Oregon. It was an interesting place with a little bit of information about a lot of things, including Gorge Geology,the Oregon Trail, the Lewis & Clark Expedition, and historic Dalles City. I learned about the massive ice age floods that helped shape the Colombia Gorge as it is today. I also learned a new unrelated word: oology. The girls were interested in the old-fashioned telephone in the Umatilla House exhibit. The girls did a photo scavenger hunt and earned some activity books for turning their pencils back in at the end.

To get home, we drove down the old highway on the Oregon side to the Rowena Crest viewpoint, where we had a view of Lyle on its ice age flood sand bar on the Washington side.

For dinner, we had chick pea spaghetti with pesto, and as we were out of Rocky Road ice cream, I convinced Dad to bake a batch of brownies for dessert (it was an easy sell). We had the brownies as a special treat once we got home from another successful deer walk. There was also some racing and some tag playing along the way.

Other wildlife sightings today included a hummingbird in the cosmos right outside the front window, a bunny in the front yard, and a pair of California quail - the female was on the ground near the lavender, the male, with its charming top knot, was on the bird bath.

I tested Laureva again as today was Day 5 of Covid for us. Her test was still positive, but the line was faint this time.

We did reading time again before bed. I read a chapter of Lupe Wong Won't Dance to Laureva. Then I asked Maeva to read Agatha Christie to me as I had been fighting a slight headache all afternoon. We started "While the Light Lasts," which reminded me in many respects of the Holmes story "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier." We're reading from a volume of the complete Miss Marple and other stories, which seem to be in order by publication date, but so far, Miss Marple has not appeared and I don't think these early stories are among Christie's best.