Family vacation part 1 - Tillamook

On Thursday, July 16th we left DH's parents' house and drove to the Oregon coast for the family reunion. The day before we left on our trip my husband drove down to his office to pick up a wireless Sprint network card for his laptop that the office lends out when people leave town. It worked just fine on the first half of our drive up to Washington, but then when I got it out to try and email DH's parents I couldn't get it to work and it didn't work the rest of our trip! It made things quite a bit more difficult for us because we had been depending on having internet access for some info for our trip and then weren't able to use it. Before we left the in-laws house we looked up the address and directions that DH's mom had emailed to us but then when we left the house the computer crashed and we lost all of that info. So we knew basically how to get to the beach house and I had printed up beforehand directions to the town that it was in, but once we got there we ended up having to drive around for about 20-30 minutes looking for the house. Plus it didn't help that DH and I don't have cell phones so we couldn't call his dad to get the directions (and my husband didn't want to look for a pay phone). Luckily DH had remembered enough of the house number and street name that we were finally able to find it!

The beach rental house had 3 floors and it was decided beforehand that each family would have one room for their family, so DH and his two brothers and his sister and then parents would each have a room. Our family decided to take the basement floor which consisted of a large open room with an outside entrance and small bathroom with tiny shower. The room had a queen size bed, a twin bed, a couch, fireplace, TV and lots of open space. The layout of the house was quite different because you had to go through the laundry/utility room to get to the stairs to the main floor and then the staircase to the second story was through the kitchen in the back of the house. The bathroom downstairs was TINY - like a little hallway. The toilet was so close to the wall that you almost had to sit on it sideways to keep your knees from hitting the wall - and the shower was just a super small enclosure next to the toilet.

Well, the reason I am describing all of this is because the first night the kids were playing around with their cousins before bedtime when Kitty slipped and fell downstairs coming through the laundry room. The kids said that there was a puddle of water in the laundry room and that is what Kitty slipped on. So we went down and looked and there was a drain in the middle of the room near the washing machine and there was some water that had come up out of the drain. Well, it wasn't a lot and the water went back down so we didn't think anything more about it. We were going to have our kids take turns sleeping on the bed & couch & floor during our stay so we set up the sleeping bags that we had brought and got the kids to bed and then ourselves.

Then comes the next morning and while we were upstairs eating breakfast one of the kids came up and said that there was water in the laundry room again. Then a little while later I asked Luke to go downstairs and get dressed and he came up and said that the bathroom floor was all wet... So we finally went downstairs to check it out and there was water everywhere!! All in the bathroom, laundry room and even onto the carpet in the main room. I quickly picked up all of our stuff and piled them on the beds & furniture in the room. In the meantime my mother-in-law called the manager of the place and he came over to take a look. When he realized the extent of the problem he called the sewer company and a plumbing company to come out and investigate the problem. We had been planning on going to the beach that day but decided as a family to change our plans and head out of town for several hours while the problem got fixed and cleaned up.

So we headed off to the Tillamook Cheese Factory and then to the Tillamook Air Museum which were about an hour drive south of where we were staying. The cheese factory was pretty neat to see. It was jam packed with visitors and you can walk around the factory and view the different processes of cheese making. My father-in-law treated us all to ice cream cones which the kids enjoyed and then DH bought some cheese curds for everyone to try. The kids loved them - especially Blondie. She couldn't get enough. And they didn't start squeaking until they warmed up a little bit. The air museum was more interesting for the adults than the kids, but the kids had some fun running around the hangar with their cousins.
Some of the kids fell asleep on the way back to the beach house and we stopped at the grocery store on the way to buy some food for the meals we were in charge of later on in the weekend.