Weekend trip - Friday

We've had a crazily busy weekend - which I'll get to - but I wanted to give fair warning that I'm shamelessly back-dating posts. It's my own personal version of time travel.

We decided at the last minute this week (about Tuesday) to pull the trigger on our central Oregon rock-hunting trip and left on Friday. We didn't get to do this rock-hunting on the way back from Montana last summer as planned (with just me and the boys - rest assured I won't be making that mistake again). For reasons I'd better not go into, I decided I would rather do it when Devin could come with us and help me ride herd on the boys. Wise choice!

It's about a four hour trip from here to Prineville, our destination. It only took about a half-hour for me to realize that those with the y chromosome in my family speak, quite literally, a different language - one I have neither the time nor the inclination to become fluent in.

Dakota was reading one of those card trading magazines (he's an avid card collector and has THOUSANDS). All of a sudden, "No WAY! DUDE! I have a Charzard EX! It says here that it's worth $130!" Devin, injecting calm, "Just because it says it's worth that doesn't necessarily mean you could sell your card for that. We could check it out on Ebay. It's like your Kayor. If you hadn't activated it, it would have been worth $90, but if you wanted to sell it, since it's already activated, it would only be worth around $30." Dakota, "Yeah, but I didn't know before I activated it. And I wouldn't have wanted to sell it anyway because I have an underworld deck and he makes it really hard to beat me. I wish I had a Lord Van Blut. Then I would be invincible." Devin, "And I wouldn't want Kayor, because I have an overworld deck. I would need Fribit."

Dylan clearly understood the conversation because he chimed in at the right times. I, on the other hand, am left scratching my head. First, although I recognize that they are speaking Pokemon (and later Chaos) I (stubbornly??) don't speak that language. Second - $130 for a CARD???? One that my 9-year-old son has in his room and plays with??? Who has this kind of money? All those with y chromosomes (husband and sons) seemed to take this in stride. I, on the other hand, am thinking we need to sell all those cards littering the bedroom floors and fund four years at a private university for the boys with it because this is serious money. Clearly this is not only a language barrier, but also a culture barrier.

Anyway, we finally got to Prineville and checked in at our home away from home for the next three days. They had these totally charming sculptures around the hotel. These are two of them. There are some very similar ones here in Newport and I'm wondering if they are done by the same person.

We raced out to our first site but got there with only about a half-hour to search and the coordinates weren't in our GPS unit so we didn't even really know where to look. We had an unproductive hunt (lots of jasper but nothing else) with an "exciting" trip back down a steep talus slope trying to beat the sunset. We managed to make it back to the path before total dark but by the time we got back to the van it was ghost-story black outside. If we had only known, this was a harbinger of things to come.