For our first anniversary we went to Portland for the weekend. This actually started late Friday when we drove up to Salem with my Dad. That night Dad and Janice took us out to dinner at the Olive Garden and we got to endure a lovely song. Fortunately, they waited until I had had a few martinis so I didn't complain too much. We got these lovely hats so that we could remember our humiliation (hahaha)...

FYI, this is probably a good place to point out that there are quite a few pictures on this page and if you are using dialup it'll take a good 5 minutes to load this page on a 56k modem.

The next morning we headed into Portland and went to the zoo. Where we saw a bunch of animals...

And of course, we rode the little train...

And saw a few elephants...

A funny yak thing (ok, it is actually a musk ox, I think)...

And a bird or two...

Rhinos, Zebras...

A funny looking horned thing and a giraffe.

This guy was actually quite funny. He refused to move. Appearently convinced he was hidden... I could almost hear the camelion from Dr. Doolittle 2 in my head...

We walked into one room that just about knocked you over... It was hot and very humid, but there was an alligator!!!

And then we found a kitty too.

So, after this we drove into town to find our hotel and walked around a little bit. Then back to the hotel and take a nap and off to the dinner cruise. The dinner cruise thing was the Spirit of Portland cruise and it is very nice. We sat towards the front on the lower deck...

This went into the night and we saw a parade thing along the river called the Illumination or something... Yes, there are people in that picture...

The next day we got up and sorta wondered over to Angie's house. Apparently, Kyli has lost a tooth. Unfortunately, this was about the best picture we could get of the occasion. I left it bigger because it can be hard to see. You can kinda see a sudden drop off in the old tooth line. She wasn't about to let us get a good picture of it...

Here is another picture, not quite as obvious (I only say that because my goofy teeth probably look like that normally)

After some convincing Angie agreed to make some faces for us...

Anyway, after we left Angie's house we finally got on the highway and drove down to Eugene where we stopped off at the tommy gun store and played with the tommy guns. Actually, I played with them one time and for $30 you can fire off 50 rounds (which takes about 2 minutes). Here is the mess I made. The guy thought it was pretty good, but I didn't tell him I was aiming at the center of his chest.

Then we went on to Wildlife Safari. Probably one of the funnest things to do is to ride through this on the center console with the moon roof open and pretend like you are on safari in Africa.

In here we got some cool pictures of some pissed off osterich, a couple of giraffes, some bears, big cats and more elephants (which I left out). When we first drove in there were a couple of pissed off osteriches that didn't seem interested in our arrival. They started chasing after some of the cars so we just got behind them and moved on...

Then we played with a few giraffees. They got close enough that at one point we were underneath of them, which makes for an interesting photo.

Then on to the bears...

Yes, they were close to the cars a few times...

We also got to see some buffalo and a camel and a deer that were trying to share some food... It wasn't looking real good for the deer...

Then there were a few cats... If they couldn't kill you almost instantly they would probably be fun to pet...

Some of the cats were in cages.

Then we came to the end where they had a nice tractor.

The rest of the drive home was basically uneventful. The end.