I'm not sure if anyone who is outside the teaching world really realizes just how rough it is to be a first year teacher at any school. If you think that you show up and they hand you a lesson plan that says teach this, that is not how the show goes. You show up and they hand you a classroom and tell you that you are the expert. Then you are on your own. Sink or swim, that is kind of up to you. So you spend hours upon hours working at making each day a better experience for you and your students. The amount of hours you put in and the amount of effort you get back from the other side is sort of not even comparable. So when you get a chance to step away and enjoy some time with the family, you got to take it. We did on this day as we sat on the shores of Deer Creek. I had been running more frequently lately with Corey Culp, our Technology teacher. We mainly ran around school but sometimes we would go up on the McKenzie River Trail which was a fantastic place to run. The section between Deer Creek and the Blue Pool trailhead was particularly fantastic, so I got inspired to take the family up there to hang out on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in May when we did not have to work.
The walk was less than half of a mile and we had to do a bit of bushwhacking to get below the bridge to a nice spot. I even brought a chair, a book, and everything to just spend the day at the creek. It was fantastic. The kids loved it. They dug around in the rocks and even got into the water a bit. It was so cold, but they gave it a shot. They waded in and were braver than Jacqueline when it came to dealing with the cold. It was just a fantastic day. It was so fantastic that we found ourselves back again when our next weekend day arrived. This was a Friday and the weather was just as wonderful as it was the previous weekend.
We brought swimsuits this time and even braved the cold a little bit more. Being by the creek was just so amazing that we began to think about a piece of property that Jacqueline had seen almost a year ago when we were initially looking at houses. I never saw the place and she remembered as a house where the floor was slanting oddly and there was a dead mouse when she walked in. The property, though, was amazing. It was on Dearborn Island which 6 months out of the year, had a branch of the McKenzie River flowing right near the house on the property. We talked to our real estate agent and she said that the place was still available and we could go see it whenever we wanted.
The next day we popped on over and this started the process of us buying our first home. It was an absolutely fantastic spot right by the river and while it took us a couple of months to actually get into the place, it all started because of the enjoyable days that we spent hanging out at Deer Creek.
