We had a great week playing with them around their work schedules and experiencing some super cool new things as well as some old favorites.
One amazing experience we had was heading to watch the Swifts which is a September Portland tradition. Every year the migrating birds return to take shelter in the chimney at the Chapman Elementary school. One population has been returning there since the 1980s, and it's one of the largest known roosting sites of migrating Vaux’s Swifts! We joined tons of others on the grass with our picnic to wait as the sun got lower and more and more of them began to return and fly all around us.
What's so incredible is that every evening, around sunset, they swarm back into the chimney to roost for the night. Once they start the chimney looks like a large vacuum cleaner hose sucking them up! Here's a short video showing them (this went on for quite a while as they all just kept entering the chimney). It must be super crowded inside that thing!
We loved having an entire day to play with Kim and spent it eating yummy food, returning to the Japanese Garden, enjoying Powell's Books on Hawthorne and getting some yummy stuff at a fancy chocolate store.
One day we took a hike (and battled unprecedented numbers of mosquitos) with Heidi on Sauvie Island.
Of course there were food trucks, biking, cooking and hanging out.
On Saturday we had a full day adventuring together which started at the Lan Su Chinese Garden which opened in 2000. According to their website it's "a result of a collaboration between the cities of Portland and Suzhou". It's not a very big garden, but beautifully done and filled with spectacular landscaping, rock patterns, bonsai trees as well as a tea house where we sat outside for tea/nibbles.
Then we walked and walked and walked all over downtown bopping into various places for drinks (yes, even a flaming Spanish coffee), food, artist booths and to see some of Kevin/Heidi's old stomping grounds.
In between all of that fun I grabbed moments to sit outside in their yard to capture the wildlife. I'm astonished at the colors that show up on the hummingbirds depending on how the light hits them.
Great photos! The ones of dad and kim are sooo good