Day: July 28, 2018

When I was a young child, every year around Thanksgiving, my family and various friends would travel from Humboldt down to the Bay Area to stay with other friends in a little town called La Honda. At that time, La Honda was quite rural, nestled up among the redwoods at the center of the South Peninsula, and felt quite remote from Palo Alto, just down the hill. Nowadays, of course, La Honda is fully overtaken by Silicon Valley bazillionaires and quite uninhabitable by air-breathing folk. But the tradition, back then, was to have a kind of extended, hippyish get-together with lots of guitars and good food and hanging out. It wasn't always just Thanksgiving – there were summer reunions, too.

Well, that tradition has drifted around, geographically, over the intervening decades. Mostly, I haven't made it to these reunions. A few times I made it at Thanksgiving, because it was typically hosted at Juli and Keith's in Oregon. But the summer gatherings were not something I ever made it to. Many of these have been hosted at the Hohstadt's property in southern Humboldt, but as the generations have shifted the location has relocated north to Olympia, where Sherry and Greg live.

Anyway, all these years later (I guess, about 40 years later relative to the last time I was part of this), it's still happening. It ends up a very nostalgic time for me. The oldest generation are often people I knew who were young adults when I was a child – people like Juli and Keith, David (who is now with Vivian), Pat and Steve. They remember me as a 10 year old boy. Subsequent generations are not so well-known to me. I know about them but in many cases have never met them before. Anyway… 

Here's a picture of Pat and Steve. Bear in mind that I remember these as a young adult couple, parents to a boy a year older than me who I often played with. They're maybe a few years younger than my parents. I remember them playing guitars and singing old folk songs, back then. And they still are, all these years later.

Arthur attended these gatherings too – much more than I have, over the years. So having him come has been good for him, I think. It ties into old memories, he knows most of the people, and he can feel comfortable in a larger social setting. I tried to get a picture of him – this picture is a bit low-resolution, because it was dark, but he's there.

When we drove up, we didn't go through Portland. Instead, we went up west of Portland and crossed the Columbia River at Kelso. Arthur managed to figure out how to take a picture of the rather old-style, very high bridge with my phone, while I was driving.

[daily log: walking, 2km]