Bridge and Bricks

A very full weekend, if I do say so myself.

Mary and I woke up at the crack of dawn on Saturday and began laying pavers. We got in a good four hours of work - finishing the path to the first patio, and getting about half of the second patio done. It went really fast - partially because we didn't have to think too much, so we could just lay things down.

We only worked for that little bit because we were meeting some friends at Silver Falls for lunch/dinner and some hiking/swimming. Portia and Gordon hung out for some food and chit-chat, but had to leave early due for a poker night. So, we spent the rest of the time hanging with Carol and her two kids Jess and Paul. The kids played in the water and we adults waxed poetically about life. Good times.

Our plan after that was to head up to Portland and crash at Ron/Cyndi's house. Why? Because at the last minute, we'd decided to ride the Bridge Pedal. Mary had been wanting to do it for a long while now, and we'd totally spaced out on the fact it was this weekend. Originally, we were going to be in Napa Valley for a friend's wedding, but due to the drawn out nature of our project, we passed.

So, last minute, we hung out in Portland, waking up at 6am to ride over all the bridges in Portland. The views are pretty amazing, and it's cool to ride on bridges that are normally full of cars driving 70 miles an hour (the Marquam and Freemont). My favorite bridge is the St. Johns Bridge. It was designed by the same guy who did the Golden Gate (and he liked the St. Johns better). One of the really neat things about it is that when your crossing it heading east, Mt. St. Helens is perfectly centered in the bridge.

The weather was beautiful, and the ride a lot of fun. There were a bunch of people whining about it being the "Bridge Walk" or the "Bridge Crawl" because there were some traffic jams, but I'd expected that. What else would happen when you have 18,000 people doing an organized ride? My only real gripe (other than the gripers) was that people had no clue how to ride in a group - they would swerve suddenly and erratically, and they had no idea how to stay right when riding slowly.

This was Mary's longest bike ride ever (just a little longer than her ride when we did reach-the-beach a few years back).

After cleaning up and eating some yummy food on Hawthorne, we drove back home and worked on the patio again. We finished up the second half of the round (2nd) patio and worked a little bit on swapping out stones in the first patio. Because of my mis-order, we ended up with two shades of bricks, and they didn't get mixed as well as we wanted. So we swapped some of the darker stones for redder stones. It's a pain in the butt to fit the stones back in, but we think the overall effect will be really nice.

We were just too busy to get any pictures of the progress on the patio, and I'm just too lazy to put up the couple of bridge pedal pictures. So you'll have to wait and hold your breath.