Oregon Living 2024 – Blog #10 – A Dancing and Gambling Weekend!

 

Sunday, March 3^rd., 2024…… Another chilly day. Temps will only get up to 40° today. Rains are coming and going but nothing too bad. Just cold! We walked the dogs and then I went to get us coffee and breakfast. We went to our beginner’s class to angel then I headed over to the senior center to help angel that class. Cathye passed on joining us at the pizza parlor afterward and stayed home and kept warm and snuggly on the couch. She is catching up on episodes of The Voice. I brought her home a pizza though. Spa and then bed.  

Monday, March 4^th., 2024…… We had a glorious morning of sunshine and blue skies! It was still pretty chilly (and yes, I am still in shorts – duh!) but we sure enjoyed walking the girls this morning! Today was another gym day so we did that and went to Kevin's for breakfast. We got home and did some laundry. We will need it for this weekend. We are leaving on Thursday for a weekend retreat on the coast. The Corvallis Square Dance Club does this event every year. This will be our first. They have a dance on both Fri. and Sat. nights. They also arrange for a dinner together at a local place they like. We are going a day earlier and we’re staying about 20 minutes up the coast at Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City. Again, our friends Mike and Cheryl are frequent flyers and have comp rooms. If they book our rooms we get their discount.  After the laundry, Cat worked a little in her potting shed while I worked in my shop. We also received an order from Amazon. Jamie needed a new top mattress and we ordered one yesterday and it came today. We needed to unpack it and it needs 72 hours to expand. We are afraid that Jamie won’t wait to use it so we opened it and let it expand here at the house. We’ll take it over before we leave on Thursday.   Dinner, tv and spa before bed. 

Tuesday, March 5^th., 2024…… Really cold this morning! Temps in the low 30s. We got some light rain. There is snow in the foothills and some of the folks in Sweet Home told us they had a little. Ginger, who lives up the hill from Sweet Home said she got 7 inches of snow!  But we walked the dogs and got through it ok. Breakfast and a little cleanup around the house.  Later, we headed off to our workshop. Cathye is sure getting better!  This class has some folks who don’t get out to dance much so they are pretty rusty and Charlotte really has to work when she teaches! But we all improve with the floor time so it’s fun to go. After that, we came back home and she worked again in the potting shed and the shop. No rain but since it was still pretty cold, we both came in to warm up and relax for the rest of the day. We hit the spa again after tv. Did I mention it was cold! 

Wednesday, March 6^th., 2024…… After walking and feeding the girls, we ate breakfast, we spent some time this morning cleaning up. Cathye went over to help Lona with some phone issues while I worked on vacuuming and cleaning the bathrooms. When she got back, we both got out clothes for our trip.  I think we are ready to leave tomorrow! We checked out the mattress we bought for Jamie and found it was pretty much expanded now so I loaded it in the truck and Cathye took it over for Jamie to unload and put on his bed. He’s really hard on mattresses and this is the second one we’ve bought him in two years! We’ll find out next week if he likes this one.  

Thursday, March 7^th., 2024…… After walking and feeding the fur babies, and eating breakfast, we had a little work to do. The plan this morning was to make sure we had everything ready for Kennedy. We wrote her out a note and had that on the counter. We finished our packing and left around noon. The drive through the Coastal Mountains was easy and very pretty. The weather was terrific. Blue skies and dry roads! We met up with Mike and Cheryl at the Chinook Winds Casino 

and gambled for a while. Of course I lost and Cathye was up a bit!  When it was time for check-in, we headed across the street to the hotel and got our rooms. They were very nice and looked out onto the ocean. We unpacked and then all of us took a walk on the beach. 

The tide was out and it exposed the rocks offshore. We were able to walk on and around the rocks and saw the sea life. Star fish and sea anemones were plentiful!

The temperature out there was a very nice 67°.  That is so nice this time of year!  Later, we went to the hotel’s restaurant for a nice meal. They had a ½ price special on steak and crab ($30.) and I chose that. The others had coconut prawns. 

Everything was delicious. Since we are staying in the hotel, we enjoyed our 10% discount on those dinners (mine was already discounted).  Plus, we got to see a terrific sunset and hang gliders!

Afterwards, we all shuttled back over to the casino. I am not the gambler that Cathye is, so after a bit, I walked back to the room and watched tv while she stayed and enjoyed her time with her machines!   

Friday, March 8^th., 2024…… We slept in this morning and then got showered and dressed. We decided to go out to breakfast and went into town for that. They still have a Lil Sambos here in Lincoln City and we wanted to go there.

 

Turns out it was closed permanently!  So we chose Pig and Pancake, which turned out to be an excellent choice!  After breakfast, we drove around and stopped at Goodwill and at another antique store in town and looked around (and bought a few things!) before returning to our hotel. We went out and enjoyed another walk on the beach. The weather was even better than yesterday!  The tide was in so we couldn’t go out to the rocks again but we still had a nice walk up the coast.

Turns out this would be the last nice day for a while so we were glad we went when we did!  More casino time for Mike, Cheryl and Cathye before we had to leave for dinner. The Corvallis club had chosen a place and made reservations there for a large group for an early dinner. But when they called to confirm, they were told that they didn’t have adequate staff and couldn’t accommodate us. So we all split up. Our club chose Dory Cove as an alternative. We had 11 for dinner. Not fancy in any way,

but they had a large room in the back and we all got seated together. I can’t speak for everyone else, but my crab stuffed ravioli was delicious!  After that, we all headed over to the Gleneden Beach Community Club for the dance. It was casual dress tonight. It was a lot of fun!

We stayed until the end and then drove over to the group’s campground and raided Shaun and Lila’s rv and visited with everyone for a bit.

 

When we got home, we turned in after a long day!

Saturday, March 9^th., 2024…… This morning we went down to the hotel’s restaurant and had breakfast. 

The weather had definitely turned for the worse! It was super windy. They said later on the morning news that gusts on the coast reached 50 mph! But we walked there anyway and had a nice breakfast, looking out to the choppy seas.  The plan today was to go back to the Community Club for a potluck. Cheryl had made blueberry cookies, but we needed to stop and pick up something. Cathye got chips and dip and we headed over. I was still stuffed from breakfast so I passed on the meal.  Next up was fun and games. They did a trivia game where they set up four 8-person teams to complete against each other in 50s, 60s, and 70s music trivia. They would play a snippet from a song and you would have a writer (me) write down the song title, the artist, and the year. Then your runner took it up to the front. First one back got points for each right answer. It was pretty tough with only 3-4 seconds of music but we did ok compared to everyone else. We got song and singer for the most part, but missed out more on the years. When I wrote down 1956, it would be 1957!  The winning team had 21 right answers, we were second with 16, followed by 12 and 11. Not too shabby!  After that, we went back to the hotel and the three gamblers went back to the casino for a while before we all got ready for the evening dance. Last night, Bruce, the Corvallis Squares Club caller, called and tonight it would be our Club caller, Charotte’s, turn. It was fun but we were beat from the weekend so we were glad when they quit a few minutes early. We helped clean up the hall and then left for the drive through the rains and winds and got back safely to our rooms and turned in. Time change tonight so we would be losing an hour.  We plan on having breakfast and then hitting the road to get home and allow Kennedy to leave early. Hopefully, the weather will be better tomorrow. Mike and Cheryl are staying one more day.