London

On Monday, Jennifer flew to England, where she is spending six weeks with the University of Portland's business program.

They spent the first few days settling in and seeing some of the sights around London. 

Yesterday they went out to Windsor Castle.

Grand Assembly

This weekend was Oregon Rainbow's annual convention, which was held out in Pendleton. Thursday night was opening, and they gave out ritual awards. Jennifer won the Grand Prize in two categories.

Friday morning, the new Grand Officers were announced. Jennifer was appointed Grand Drill Leader for the next year.

The Grand Worthy Associate Advisor gave her incoming officers a mascot for the next year.  

 That night was the annual pantaloon contest.

Last night the new officers were installed.

ISC

This week Bryan and Jennifer traveled to Minneapolis for the annual convention of DeMolay International. The first session of the DeMolay Congress, composed of two members of each jurisdiction, was held at the Minneapolis Scottish Rite. 

The next day, they split into groups to perform service projects.

Elections for next year's International Master Councilor and Congress Secretary were held at the State Capitol. 

Boulder Beach

There were showers on Sunday, so we didn’t get to Boulder Beach, the water park area, until today.  It was definitely the nicest part of the park, although it paled in comparison to one of the water parks at WDW.  

The two big raft rides were well done, but the lazy river just wrapped around itself, and several of the slides were plastic troughs suspended off of metal platforms, rather than built into a hillside. We were only there for about an hour before the clouds started coming in and it got colder (and it wasn’t that warm to begin with), so we decided to call it good and head for home.

Silverwood is no Disneyland, but it’s a nice for a weekend, especially if you’d like to camp and just relax.

Silverwood

On Friday, we packed up the RV and headed north towards Silverwood, a theme park in northern Idaho. We stopped for the night about halfway there, and arrived at Silverwood on Saturday afternoon. We stayed at the Silverwood RV park. Our site was great, right next to the entrance to the park. It only had a few drawbacks – a couple of trees between our site and the other sites and the walkways would have been nice, there was only 30 amp power, and there was no wi-fi. Luckily cell phone reception was good. We parked the rig and headed into the park. 

Silverwood has an odd layout, partially because it is multiple parks in one, and partially because of how it has evolved over time. It started life as an airfield and air museum, then added a train around the perimeter, then an amusement park, then a water park. They call it a theme park, but the western theming is pretty thin, and offstage areas are often visible, especially from the amusement park area. The layout is kind of a flat figure 8, with the southern loop being the amusement park and northern loop being the water park. Where the loops meet is an entrance area which contains new Victorian buildings. To the west of the entrance area is the old air strip – the air museum is no longer part of the experience.

The amusement park area has four roller coasters – two woodies, a corkscrew they bought from Knott’s Berry Farm, and the old Deja-Vu boomerang they bought from Six Flags Chicago, now called Aftershock. Each is fairly low capacity - only running one train at a time, so I imagine lines can get long in the summer. Aftershock was down, so I never got to ride that. There is also a raft ride and a log ride, and a bunch of flat rides. There are no dark rides or relaxing boat rides, so the only family rides (ones that don’t throw or spin you around) are the antique cars and the train. The food prices looked to be pretty reasonable, but we mostly ate in our RV, so I can’t attest to quality.