Leslie Kozinski

As I've said, I'm not very good at keeping up with my e-journal. It's been a few months since my last entry. Sorry.....but, it's time to get caught up. After leaving Lake Simtustis we headed to Silver Falls State Park to report for our volunteer duties. Once settled in we met our volunteer ranger who turned out to be an absolute wonderful surprise. Carlie had recently started as Silver Falls as the Host Coordinator Ranger earlier that spring. We simply love her! Our accommodations were a private camping loop reserved for the volunteer hosts and not in the camp ground along with "regular" campers :). Another wonderful surprised that turned out to be. Our duties included, for Chad; day use clean-up, wood working projects and anything else that popped up. For me, I was in the main lodge 2 days a week dispensing information, 2 days a week at trail heads and once a week working on a project re-creating the safety data sheets for the maintenance yard. We met some wonderful fellow volunteers and made new friends. Most we will see again next summer when we return to Silver Falls.

We left Silver Falls the last week of September and headed for Junction City for some repairs and maintenance on the moho. After spending a week in their parking lot we were ready to move on. The nice thing is it gave us the time to make arrangements for the closing on Mom's house and the estate sale. From JC we went back to Lake Simtustis to meet up with Randy & Debbie Giltz, Dean & Lesa Tabert and Jim & Kathy Vilendre to celebrate Oktoberfest. What a wonderful time, we wish only that we could have spent more time with our friends.

On to Portland for 3 days to go see doctors, dentists, vets, blah, blah, blah. What a crummy way to spend precious time. By mid-October we were on our way back to Springfield to spend a few days with mom before heading south for our current destination. As you can imagine it was hard to leave mom as I won't see here again until I fly home to spend her 98th birthday with her and the rest of my family in February.

It took 4 days to travel to our current location here in the Palm Springs area, stopping in Grants Pass to spend an evening with my niece and her family.

We've spent the past few weeks getting to know the Palm Springs/Palm Desert area as well as getting to know several folks here at the park, learning pickleball, bocce ball, playing cards, and Chad has plugged into the music community here. There is absolutely no excuse for boredom as there are activities galore. I want to try my hand at wood carving and some cornhole. I tried the water volleyball but at the risk of sounding pretentious it hardly resembled the volleyball I know and love. Oh well.

That’s all for now, I hope everyone has a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving.Read more