International Roses

Saturday morning rolled around earlier than I thought it should have…we started off the day with a little berry picking on Sauvie Island.  We were hoping to let the kids do a little swimming, but it wasn’t quite as safe to go swimming there as we had assumed, with drop-offs and such.

I think we picked about 5 pints of strawberries and 1 pint of raspberries.  We were about a week early on the raspberries and so we really had to look for those. Lunch time crept up on us and after a quick trip to the grocery store we hiked up to see the International Rose Gardens.  This is actually the testing site for new varieties of roses….and it was everything you might think it would be. 

While we enjoyed our lunch my brother told us how last weekend he and a friend had come up and picked up rose petals that had dropped to the ground and “graphed” them into other roses.  Jessie thought this was a fabulous idea and concocted several new rose varieties on the spot.

Here is one of the coolest roses I saw, but then again we were here with children and probably only saw a 1/4 of the gardens.

Here you can see the neat little rows all the roses were planted in.

We lost Ken and Spencer for a while and you’ll never guess where we found them… On some of the roses they trim off all the branches except one and let it grow into a “trunk” to make a rose tree.  You can see that this one is taller than me, which isn’t real impressive, I know, but pretty cool all the same.

These are a variety of single layer roses…so beautiful! And last of all us under the arch of roses. Next we went to a 3-D photography shop that had a free display for the day.  It was quite entertaining for the kids to look though a bunch of 3-D books and try and reach out and touch the pictures that looked so real.

They also let us watch an 8-minute 3-D nature movie. I’ve never been to a 3-D movie and I was impressed at how well it worked.

Next we relaxed at a nearby park while the kids played on the toys and then ended up throwing around a frisbee for a while.

Our last stop of the day was for Sushi.  (Aunt Chris - Portland has a Sushi-go-Round too!)  We got to ride the electric street car to get there and Spencer didn’t want to get off.  We reassured him that we would get to ride in it again when we were done with dinner. Now when the kids found out we were going to sushi, Mark was all excited to try something new and Jessie was totally grossed out and was sure we were all going to get sick.  As it turns out Mark got in one bite of rice and cucumber rolled in seaweed and nearly got sick, and boy could I relate to him after my first bite too.  Jessie didn’t try that one but actually really like the tuna/shrimp rolled up in rice with egg around the outside to hold it together.  She even asked for seconds!!

Mostly the kids loved the chop sticks an we are now the proud owners of four new pairs of chopsticks.  Mark has tried to eat both lunch and dinner with them.  We gave quick hugs to Uncle Mark before running to catch the street car back to our van.  Unfortunately in the quickness we forgot to ask the easiest way to get back on the freeway.  We drove around for only an hour until we saw a police lady and could ask for some directions.  The really silly part was that we had a map and knew exactly where we were, but all the onramps we could find were headed in the wrong direction!  What a totally CRAZY city layout!!

When we finally got home we BBQ’ed for the those who didn’t fill-up on sushi.... that meant everyone had at least one burger!