West Coast Tour: Oregon

After the Rainbow Gathering, a few of us (5 to be exact plus the cat) piled into our mini-van and headed to Oregon. We were on our way to visit my friend Sarah from college, in Salem and ended up camping out behind our friend Heather’s house for a night, which was a lot of fun to see her!


After that we finally made it to Sarah’s house. It had been 2 years since I had seen Sarah, so it was wonderful to see her again! She let us all camp out in her house and spoiled us to death with food and kindness. We were truly blessed by Sarah and her husband Troy. While we were visiting Sarah we stopped by her parent’s house to say hello and low and behold, there was Wanda (Sarah’s mom) making me a beautiful rug on her loom. I was amazed and we all got to try our hand at the loom…what a wonderful way to work on getting your aggression out as you bang on the loom! No, really, it was great you, should try it sometime!


After Sarah’s we drove around all of Oregon. Not really but it felt like it. We headed towards the beach, where we spent a couple days camped out and enjoyed Oregon’s rocky shoreline. Then we headed inland and spent a few days at some lake in the mountains, where Ben and I went canoeing and I thought to myself…I have never been canoeing and looking at snow capped mountains at the same time before. Spectacular!


The next day was our friend Angela’s birthday; she was one of the five traveling with us. So we drove up to Crater Lake, gazed at the beauty up there. Then, we headed towards a little fancy cheese shop and a chocolate shop. Of course we had to eat at Taco Bell (yuck) because it is Angela’s favorite (made the sacrifice for her!!).

West Coast Tour: The Rainbow Gathering

Our team finally arrived in Montana and met up with us. It was so wonderful to see them. Didn’t realize how much we had missed everyone taking off early. We spent a couple of days getting ourselves ready to head into the Gathering, and then we hopped in the bus and took off for South-Western Washington, where the Gathering was held this summer.

It was a very interesting year. Well, actually, it was a hard year for me. Ha! It started off with hiking in later in the day (we usually hike into the Gathering in the morning) and then on top of that…it rained! This was my 10th national Gathering and I have never had to hike into a Gathering in the rain. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it just been rain…but there were still snow banks taller than me all around…so the rain was COLD!! Needless to say we tried to hike in as fast as we could and get all our tents set up and our personal stuff brought in but by that time we were all soaked and our stuff was soaked and the sun was going down. BURR!! I attempted to make dinner for our team that night, but we had forgotten all the cooking utensils, so I made pasta with a tent pole…interesting.

We had a hard time getting ourselves together after that first day. We normally go into the National Gathering with almost 30 people on our team and this year we had 20. We normally have our kitchen set up and running by the afternoon of our 2nd day at the Gathering, and this year we were limping along and not completely set up by the 4th day that we were there. A few of us took turns being in charge of the cooking in the kitchen…which we normally do, but this year it was 10 straight hours of cooking in one day for each of us. I would try to have at least two meals cooking, beans in the pressure cooker cooking and two meals being prepared to cook with each meal serving at least 150 people. Not to mention having to make sure to get beans, lentils and rice soaking so that they would cook faster. Praise the Lord that we each had “Kitchen Monkey’s” (someone to help us do all the cooking for the day…thanks Michaela!!!!) this year! Usually by 2:30ish I would get delirious and not really know what I was doing…it truly was the grace of God that any food got made at all! Ha! This year I also learn how to use a saw and cut wood for our bonfires, yep, in 10 years I had never pick up a saw and I didn’t even cut any fingers off!

All this to say, I really learned that in our weakness God is strong! I learned that God can still move regardless of me. Praise the Lord because He is SO good! So even though I think it was a tough gathering and I really can’t remember all of the details because of delirium, I do know that God moved, people got to see Jesus in us and we got to love on the Rainbow Family!


Picture: Me cooking away in the Jesus Kitchen

West Coast Tour: Side Trip

The next part of our trip we had planned on going to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons. However, since our trip to Devil’s Tower resulted in us having a broken tent, we needed to get that fixed. Thankfully we had gotten our tent at REI and we have a membership, so that means lifetime warranty on anything we purchase from them! We were in the middle of nowhere, pretty much, and the nearest REI was 6 hours away…in the wrong direction from Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. So, we made some adjustments and headed towards Bozeman, Montana.

I had never been to Montana and I was quickly taken in by the beauty that can be found there! We spent the night in Bozeman and got our tent replaced the next day with one that can stand up to wind! We had fun setting up all kinds of tents in the store to see what would work best for us, since the last tent obviously didn’t really work so well!

Later that day we took off towards Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. We stopped at a campground on the side of the road that night, which was a little strange but beautiful. Then the next morning we packed up and made it to Coeur d’ Alene and found a campsite towards the south end of the lake were we camped for 3 nights. It was so nice being here because we definitely needed some rest before meeting up with the Jesus Kitchen team and heading into the Gathering. This time was great because it was a little cold and rainy which made staying in the tent and sleeping really nice!


After our time at Lake Coeur d’ Alene, we heading back to Missoula, Montana to wait for someone from our team to arrive at the airport. Once she flew in we headed two hours north to a little town called Lakeside, where the YWAM Montana base is. We set up camp and waited for the rest of our team to arrive. While we waited we found a cheap place to get our kitty (we have now named her Gypsy) neutered, which was awesome because we didn’t want her going into heat at the Gathering! And while we waited we took a quick tour of Glacier National Park. Amazing! I wish we had had more time…days actually…to spend there. It was so beautiful. Words and pictures cannot describe the beauty of God’s creation in that place! Still as glass lakes, wild rivers gushing, mountains so tall that the tops were engulfed in foggy clouds, far away waterfalls cascading down the mountainsides and glaciers tucked into crevasses way up in the mountains…just to describe a few things. What can be more beautiful than all of those things in one place? It was a very magical place and I would love to return there someday.