Marilee’s Travels

after work on friday the 13th i headed down to eugene thinking it would take +2 hours. to my surprise i was at the henry’s front door in 1.5. they have a new house and have settled in nicely. they have a wonderful back yard and house filled with love and laughter. that night jess, john and i just stayed up chatting over beers while the kids slept. saturday morning i woke up to giggling at 7:30am. (that is a new thing for me. ouch.) thankfully it was laughter and not screaming! we enjoyed breakfast together and headed out for an adventure. downtown has a great saturday market. (that is where most of the photos are taken.) we had such a wonderful time. looking, talking and happy to be alaskans living in oregon. next stop was pizza and belly dancers. it doesn’t get much better than that. dinner was chinese take out with the strangest eggrolls ever. (yuck). that evening we all piled into the kids room and listened to the story jess was reading to all of us. (what a family moment). after they fell asleep i received a wealth of knowledge from john about how to play cribbage. (due to my math skills ((or lack of)) john laughed A LOT!). sunday was low-key. breakfast, making necklaces and saying goodbye until the next visit. i hope to be back very soon. j4… thanks for the family holiday!!

we left the house around 5:30 pm with the goal of setting up camp at bagby hotsprings and eating as soon as possible. we drove down the last of the many fire roads with 3 miles left to go, the hopes of sitting in a quiet hot tub in the middle of woods was warming my body.

we turned one of the last corners to see a man standing in the road with a cooler in one hand. there was no one in sight and the last time we passed a car was miles ago. he slowy approached the car and with our window only slightly down he said, “help. my car stolen.” we had know idea what to do. who was he? why was he out here? what was in that cooler? where is his jacket? do we help him? do we miss out on our plans, to put this guy in the car and drive him all the way back to town? because of his limited english, we had trouble finding out the whole story. it would seem that he had no friends with him, no phone, no jacket, no flashlight (it was raining and dark) and sadly, no car. we told him we needed talk and he slowly walked past the car and continued walking down the road. only later to find out… crying.

victor and i had a brief conversation and decided we could not leave him alone in the woods and would take him back to town and mourn our weekend plans later. we turned the car around and stopped near andrei. after checking his cooler for a gun or knife. (thanks to too much tv and bad movies…) he got in the car. for the next hour and a half we found out many things. he understands more than he speaks, he is from southern russia, has 4 kids and wife he loves so much he doesn’t have the heart to tell her about there stolen car over the phone. the thank yous and kind looks were a reminder that the world is good and so are it’s people.

we returned andrei safely to his home with shared hugs and smiles. as we leave he hands victor a huge jar filled with pickeled tomatoes that his wife had jarred and stored in their garage. (thankfully he didn’t know that neither of like tomatoes.)

who would have guessed that our camping trip to bagby hotsprings would turn into a 4 drive to pick up Andrei and take home his jarred tomatoes?