More Memories of Metolius

We awoke to radiant sunshine on Saturday morning - this is a view from the house....gorgeous, right?!

 

And, looking backwards...perhaps even a better view!

John was having fun taking pics - so he snapped one of me eating breakfast (we were up early while the rest of the house slept.)

Later in the morning, the whole family loaded up to visit the Skylight Cave.  Mom and Dad had never been there and were looking forward to seeing what "all the talk" was about.  Again, John having fun with the camera....(because wearing a headlamp is the "hottest" look these days...)

The road leading to the cave - it gets super narrow and can easily scratch up vehicles.  

Headed in to the caves....

Michael is enjoying the view of his wife... ;)

The view from inside the cave.

Why the cave has the name that it does.  There are three of these openings, that, particularly in the morning, give quite a light show.

As before mentioned, the narrow pathway causes scratches, so we left our Yukon Denali at the cut-off and let the kids hop in to the back of Michael's rig for the short dirt road distance.

Next stop, Dee Wright Observatory - we actually took a cut-off route to get there via the Skylight Cave route.  It's a desolate, but fascinating place to visit, with lava rock everywhere you look.  It sits at 5300 feet, and apparently, throughout history, it's snowed on every day of the year up there at least once.  The route to get to this pass is only open from about June to September (depending on snowfall), so we took advantage of this time of year to stop for a visit and picnic.

We were planning on doing a waterfall hike after that stop, but it would have led to more driving than we had in mind for the day, so instead, we headed to Sisters for ice cream.  I LOVE this little "Western" tourist town.

Everybody got something indulgent...and it enjoyed it immensely.

Upon returning to the Metolius house, we lounged by the river, the kids walked to the store (about a mile away), naps were taken, and eventually we partook in a fantastic steak bbq dinner.  The weather was starting to change up, bringing the threat of rain, but the kids still managed to beg Michael to build another fire for more s'mores and night play time. (What a great dad!).  - The rest of us headed to bed.

Sadly, I spent Sunday in bed with another headache.  On the plus side, I haven't dealt with headache issues at all since the last "major event", which is quite remarkable and used to be unheard of on a daily basis.  But, it still sucked to lose out on our last day together.  The miracle of it all, though - was that Mom was with me - and able to work on me as soon as she woke up.  She actually worked on me twice that morning which helped ebb much of the pain, but unfortunately my body had already hit "shock mode" - so all of the issues (sweats, throwing up, nausea upon any movement) were in process and seemed to need to go through its course.  Lovely.  Poor John had to pull the vehicle over half a dozen times on the way home so I could "lose it" on the shoulder of the road.  Another lovely.

I wish I could say I woke up feeling great, but that only happened after another visit to Mom this morning.  Third time was a charm on this run.  Hallelujah.  I had to have a heart to heart with Dad this morning as I know these last three visits have really bothered him seeing me go through so much.  I explained that the day-to-day has been a ton better, which is a really big deal for me, and that everyone has something they struggle with.  I also told him the next time he finds himself really feeling sorry/worried for me, he needs to visit migraine.com and start reading some of the stories put up on their forum.  Nothing like recognizing just how much worse other people have it to make me thankful for the much more minor issues I deal with.  

So, while it didn't end the way I'd hoped (and again, I wasn't able to even help clean up...felt so bad...) - it was a very special weekend of family togetherness that I know made everyone happy.  I sure hope this is something we'll have the opportunity to repeat again and again!