June 3, 2007
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Welcome to Walport, Oregon! – Part 1:
Just a short three hour drive south-west of Portland. A picturesque coastal town of about 2,000 residents and the place where Chewy’s brother got married over the Memorial Day weekend. We arrived there on Tuesday before the holiday and came back the Tuesday after the holiday. A solid week of preparing for a wedding and meeting a whole bunch of new people. Here are some of the highlights of our trip:
Tuesday: We left the house at 5-something in the morning off to BWI airport, with a layover at Denver and then finally at Portland at about 1pm. Our main goal was to stop by Costco before heading down to Walport to pick up a bunch of food for the wedding reception. Among the things we bought were various paper products, 15 boxes of egg rolls and 12 bags of Ling Ling dumplings. Yep, that’s a lot of dumplings.
We got to Walport around 4-5pm and met the bride’s side of the family and where the reception will be held at (basically her parents house). We eventually got to the place where all the grooms’ family would be staying – the extremely nice Casa de Le’on beach front rental. 
Here we see our first sunset over the Pacific Ocean and enjoy a short break before meeting the bride’s family for dinner. The funniest part of the day was while driving down to Waldport we were talking about the upcoming summer movies and how there were a ton of sequels coming out. In particular the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was interesting to me (as most comic book movies are) as I wondered if they would show Galactus, Silver Surfers boss. As I was trying to explain parts of the myth to Chewy this is how the conversation went:Me: Silver Surfer is the herald of Galactus, the planet eater.
Chewy: He eats peanuts?
Me: Uh, no. Not Planters … planets.
Chewy: Oh. But if he eats planets then technically he eats peanuts too.
Me: uh, sure that would be technically correct.
Wednesday – Three days before the wedding: It seemed like everyone but us got up late, I guess we were still on East Coast time. After a long, hearty breakfast, 11am rolled around and we went back to the reception house to get started on all the decorations.
Yep, I was surprised we started so late as well. But I guess those things tend to happen. Chewy and her eldest brother headed off to Walmart for more supplies while the groom and I begin hanging decorative lanterns strung by white Christmas lights. What seemed like a simple and easy task took a loooooong time. Today became mostly a planning day as we had to figure out how we’d run electrical to all the lights we were going to hang.
Both brothers went back to Portland over the night so they could pick
up a 25 foot rental truck could be gotten and filled with various
rental equipment such as chairs, tables, speakers, plates, cutlery, and
a bunch of heaters. After a careful search in the rental house we found some OLD BAY Seasoning! I luv me some Old Bay for crabs and french fries. See even Corey, the new addition to our stuffed animal family, likes Old Bay.
Thursday – Two days before the wedding: Chewy and I get up and out of the house by 9:30am to try and get as much decorating as possible. We spent about four hours hanging lanterns for a set of three lines that run from the house to some trees across the yard. This took much longer than I anticipated.
But ultimately it was worth it as you can see. This is a night time shot of the lanterns with a view of the bay and bridge that the house overlooks. After decorating it was time to unload the truck which had just arrived from Portland. Driving a 25 foot truck is apparently no fun as the groom had accidentally backed it into his future father-in-laws truck (luckily the truck has an extended grill on it). After the groom and I unloaded the truck and did some furniture setup it was time for dinner at the River House.
Just before dinner, we had gone back to the rental to get freshened up but we also had to wait for the 25 foot truck to make it to this house to unload some more equipment. Trying to manuver that truck was no small feat but the groom did a pretty good job doing so.
The dinner was a very informal, rehearsal dinner but mostly just a nice dinner for both families to meet and get to know each other better. The food and atmosphere were both great. I unfortunately, was just exhausted from all the stuff we had done today. After dinner, we headed back to the rental, changed, unloaded the 25 foot truck and proceeded back to the reception house to get more work done. That’s when we learned that after the groom had left the reception house he had accidently hit a water pipe that fed a sprinkler system at the house. Water was streaming down the driveway while we were at dinner. Some would say that’s “Strike Two” but thankfully, the future father-in-law seemed to take things in stride.
They had stopped the water flow by the time we had gotten back to the house and eventually, we went to bed sometime after 1am.
Friday – One day before the wedding: Up at 4am, running on three hours of sleep, to go crabbing! In the local bay, residents can go catch dungeness crab year long but can only keep those that are 5.75 inches long.
After about fours of crabbing we only caught 10 legal crabs even though we probably caught more than 50. Good thing they weren’t relying on us to provide all the crabs for tonights BBQ and crab feast. 
Crabbing was definitely fun and brought back a lot of memories of when my family used to go blue crabbing with several church families. After crabbing and moving several large potted trees to the church we rushed home to get changed for the wedding rehearsal.
Post rehearsal it was time to head back to the rental and start cooking some crabs! They had bought some 70 crabs, two huge boxes of chicken, slaw and corn on the cob. Cooking dungeness crab was so different then hot steaming blue crab. Here they cut the crab in half, while alive, rip off the two sides to move it from the main top shell. Fling the guts into a trash can and then boil/steam for 20 minutes. OK, the boil/steam for 20 minutes is normal. Then, this is the kicker, when the crabs are done they ice the crabs! That just seemed so odd. Here we love our HOT and STEAMING crabs. There they like em cold.
That was just weird. A few of us cooked and cleaned the crabs. One of the grizzled crab cooking vets kept on talking about how their method is better and as he was grabbing a live crab to be slaughtered from the 100 gallon container that we had them in, another crab got him on his middle finger. Not a pretty sight as the crab cut through his fingernail and into the underside of the finger. 
Pretty gross but thankfully he was fine and there was a house full of doctors. The feast was a hit, with lots of food and people just gathering and socializing. At some point the three Frappuccino’s and sugar wore off and complete exhaustion rolled in. I went to sleep while they had a bonfire on the beach.
Comments (1)
sounds like you had a lot of fun! awesome