I have been MIA the last week due to taking a quick and quiet trip to Oregon.

 It was a long over-due trip to see my husband’s family. We don’t get to Oregon near enough, and I’ll be the first to admit that. Flights, though, are expensive cross-country, but we happened to luck out with cheap flights on Southwest Airlines. In fact, they were cheap enough that I was able to purchase MY round trip using nothing but rewards points. (Score!) So that freed up money for the rental car, and a couple nights hotel stays (one on each end of our week at my father-in-law’s house).

When we go to Oregon, we are gloriously in the land of no-cell-service. Unless you sit close to a window. And even then its iffy. So basically, going to Oregon = getting off the grid.

But who really wants to even be on the grid with views like this:

And a cousin that makes pizzas in his own fire pizza oven…

Oh and I can’t forget to mention we’re only five minutes from the beach…

We got engaged on that beach, the first time I got to see the ocean. (The Gulf of Mexico soooo doesn’t count.) We reminisce about that every time we visit. And I find myself more and more an ocean lover. I think if I could, I’d spend hours on end on the beach just watching the waves crash, listening to their soothing rumble, breathing in the salty sea air.

Yes, I’m kinda in love with the ocean and the beach.

And cheese. Tillamook Cheese to be exact. This lactose intolerant girl can’t get enough of it.

I mean look at that gooey, cheesy goodness!

We drove by the Tillamook Air Museum long after they’d closed. Drove right up to it.

I half expected armed guard to come up to us and ask us what we were doing. Somehow, our little black Camaro went unnoticed that night. Heck, it felt kind of like we could have driven INSIDE it that night…

Upon return to Portland for our early morning flight, I asked for a nice date night. My sister-in-law took us to McMenamin’s Kennedy School the year we got engaged, and we saw the movie Jarhead in the theater. This trip, we grabbed dinner… And now, I kinda want to stay in the hotel portion in an upcoming trip.

Our week-long trip just went too fast, and we were (as always) left with things we wished to do. But we both vowed it would not be as long before we visited again. This Texas girl, who lives in Tennessee, definitely loves Oregon.

♦♦♦

CLICK HERE to see ALL my photos from our Oregon Trip, which I think are some of my favorite shots in general to date.  More posts from our trip to come this week…