Bountiful beautiful drive

Principal's morning message

The principal greets the students as they line up under the covered basketball courts each morning.  I've not gotten to be there for many morning messages but Krystle was watching Garrett for me so I was able to hang out with Danika for a few minutes. 

She looked like she was taking in his instructions.  She has a hard time paying attention sometimes. But at day three of Kindergarten wouldn't that be expected to be the case?

First of several bridges we crossed

Courtney, Garrett and I drove through St Johns on our way out to Sauvie Island this morning.  It was a beautiful sunny day.

The St Johns bridge is so beautiful. The only thing I don't like about it is the fact that bicycles have to share the lanes with cars. I'm pretty spoiled with all the bike lanes that have been put in all over the city.  I really don't want to have them make the bridge into one lane in each direction to enable a bike lane though.  I will have to "share the road" like a good Portlander.

Showing a tiny bit of color 

This is the road going down to highway 30 at the west end of the bridge. Courtney was snapping lots of pictures of lots of things.  I'm going to have to give her access to my photo gallery to use some of the other photos for her own blog. I noticed a bit of orange starting to show up on the trees.

The newest bridge in town

The bridge across to Sauvie Island was replaced a couple of years ago.  It was manufactured and then barged up the river and lifted into place.  It was pretty cool to watch it happen. 

Today we were headed to our favorite produce market at the Pumpkin Patch.

Beautiful bountiful baskets

I love all of the jewel tone colors of ripe fruits and vegetables. One of the only things I miss about our very first little rental house in Aloha is the fruit trees. We had Royal Anne cherries, Italian prune plums, Gravenstein apples, Bartlett pears, a fig tree and 3 filbert trees.

Courtney's favorite. The kids already requested pears in their lunches tomorrow.

Garett's veggie tale (tail?)

I set Garrett in the corner of a huge bin of corn. If he had his hood up he would have been camouflaged. Those big brown eyes would have given him away though. 

Edge of the corn maze

I don't remember the Pumpkin Patch having a giant hay pyramid last year.  It is over there just waiting for kids to be climbing all over it.  Maybe I'll take them out on an afternoon after school so they can play out in the field there.  I don't want to pay the admission price for the corn maze. We'll just look at it from afar.

The u-pick flower garden

The rows of zinnias go on and on.

Impressive crop of sunflowers too.

I should have dedicated a whole blog to the flower pictures I took. They were so gorgeous in the sunshine!  I'll probably intersperse them in future blogs. They're too pretty not to share :0)

Another maze at the organic farm

The Pumpkin Patch has a couple different corn mazes.  A haunted one and a regular one.  The farm just west of them has one this year too.  It has a couple of viewing platforms in the field with scarecrows around them. Plenty of fun things for every one out there from now until the first of November.

Our final bridge of the day

Courtney took this picture as we were on the ramp to the lower deck of this bridge. The Fremont is the tallest bridge in Portland and has an American flag and an Oregon State flag on top.

We noticed the flags were at half staff in memory of the American's that were lost on 9/11/2001.

"Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day?"