Weekend BlogLog - July 4th

Ricky and I went to Westwood for 4th of July weekend. My Uncle Steve used to live there and was a fire captain who was killed in the 2003 Happy Camp Forest Fire with some of his crew. His hobby was buying old house and fixing them up. When he died he had 7 houses. Our family sold all of them but one, the one he lived in. It is now our family cabin.
This is his monument at the firestation. They built trees for
each of the firefighters, a picnic area and the rock with their
pictures.








Rick and I went to Chester for the 4th and watched the town parade. I had to ran down all the kids who were trying to pick up candy that people were throwing in the streets while driving by in their floats. They were greedy little kids, they had stashes of it. All I wanted were a few pieces to eat while watching the parade.

That night Rick and I went for blackberry shakes and had a BBQ in the backyard. Saturday morning we woke up and went to the small parade in Westwood and again I was fighting with the kids just to get one piece of candy. We rode over to the parade on some old bikes we found in the garage. We spent the morning riding up and down the streets in town (there are only a few). That afternoon Jessica and Jeff came and brought the kids. Ricky pulled Drew and TJ in the red wagon down to the park where they were having the Mountain and Bluegrass festival. We watched the snowmobile drag races on the grass and played around a bit.

Then we headed over to Lake Almanor which is a huge beautiful lake that is surrounded by mouthains and green trees. However, there was a large forest fire pretty close resulting in white smokey skies. We weren't even able to see the mountains and trees on the other side of the lake. We played at the park right in front of the lake. We played badmitton, horseshoes, teatherball and of course on the playground with the kids. We then had a BBQ.

Of course Rick and I brought the dinghy. We pumped it up and headed out into the water. We were relaxing and reading our book together when all of a sudden the lake sheriff pulls right up to us in his boat on the water and asked us if we had our life jackets in the boat. He actually made us get off the water since we were considered a "small craft" and didn't have life jackets. Luckily he just gave us a warning and not a ticket! Our first incident with the dinghy.





The next morning on our way out we stopped by the Lava Tunnels or Subway Caves in Lassen National Park. It was super cool. It was a great weekend, a little time by ourselves and a little time with the family. We were glad J&J were spontaneous enough to hop in the car to meet us for the weekend.