This is something different. We are home, but we don’t have a house to come back to. We are always home, because home is Arcturus, and Arcturus is an Alpine motor home. By a different thought, however, home is where all of your best friends are. This is where we are this week. We have been visiting with the friends of our church, the friends that we worked with and friends that have been neighbors over the years. We have also visited the friends that are our bankers, our dentist and doctor and members of our family who live in the area. We have been awed by the increased traffic on the main highway, and all of the new homes that have been built where pastures used to exist around our communities. We rode Path, our trusty tandem bicycle with a friend, Ray Scholl out to the Trojan Nuclear site to take one last photo of the cooling tower before they implode it on Sunday. It was wonderful how Path remembered all of the little side trails that we used to take to get away from traffic. He was practically flying down highway 30 with a snappy tail wind to push us along as we returned from Goble.

Finally today we walked the Columbia Nature Trail here in St. Helens. Now we have lived and worked around this community since 1974, and we have had no clue that this park and trail existed. The only reason we found it was because we came to the Elks lodge here in St. Helens to camp. We noticed the sign to the trail as we drove in, so we promised ourselves that we would walk the trail. Those of our friends on this mailing list, I have a question for you. How many of you knew this park and this trail were here? Reply to this e-mail and tell me if you knew of this park.

The other thing we are doing is maintenance things; New tires for our patient Honda Civic, Little Blue. Little Blue had his own share of adventures this year. He waited patiently at a friend’s house most of the year. Glen and Cody took him to Gilroy where he got to drive in that famous California traffic and the daily grind of commuting into San Jose. Finally he carried Renee and Neil back to Hillsboro to await our return. Tomorrow we search out a shop to maintain Arcturus’s transmission so it will give us more thousands of trouble free miles.

We will be in this area for three months, but it looks like we will be just a busy as always.

We send our love to all of our friends and relatives. We will be seeing more of many of you in the next few weeks.

Gary and Judy