Posts Tagged With: life

Goodbye 2025, Hello 2026

Posted on December 31, 2025 by compassrosequeen

Hello to my friends, family, and any followers that I don’t know personally. Happy New Year and 7th Day of Christmas!

This year, I did not get any Christmas cards or newsletters sent out, so this post will have to do as far as a family update for the year. If you still need some Christmas cheer, there is a link below to an article Chris wrote recently about Charles Dickens, inspired by the film “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” I think I posted about most of our family outings and adventures on previous posts, so I won’t go into detail here. Read on for highlights of the year and updates. And stay tuned to future posts; I’m currently working on a sequel to my Grand Canyons article (“The Alps of Everywhere”) and one for a “Top 10 Things to Do in Eugene/Springfield Area”.

Here is a rundown of family highlights and new experiences for 2026:

In the winter, the kids got to bring a friend with them to play in the snow at Willamette Pass. We also got a bit of real snow here in the Valley instead of an ice storm, so I taught the kids how to make snow ice cream. In the spring we took my mom to the Enchanted Forest for her 70th birthday celebration on Mother’s Day. There, we all got tee-shirts with one of Chris’ drawings on it! They recently added that design to their online store, so you can order one if you want. Link below. Later in the spring, we bought a house! It’s a cute cottage that we are remodeling to make room for each of our 5 kids to have their own bedroom. Many thanks to my real estate agent cousin for the great find! This summer we camped at Carter Lake (part of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area) and visited Crater Lake National Park. This was the kids’ first full national park, and Chris’ first time to Crater Lake; he’d been to other national parks in the country but not Oregon’s. At the end of the summer, we went to Oaks Park in Portland so the kids could experience an amusement park with lots of rides. They loved the big scary roller coaster, and two of the kids roller skated in the nation’s oldest roller skating rink! Then on my birthday, we checked out the more northern coastal town of Newport and visited a wolf sanctuary. This fall, I went back to teaching. It’s been busy but fulfilling. My students are a hoot! I deeply appreciate my much-needed 3-year “sabbatical” in the insurance brokerage world while I got used to having 5 kids, but I am grateful to get back to where my heart is. Chris and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary in small-town Southern Oregon, exploring and taking in history. Just this week, we took the kids ice skating, a first for Chris and the two youngest ones. Our youngest had never even roller skated, so he was hugging the rim and having a tough time, but he refused to stop! By the end, he was able to skate a little without holding on. Next time, we’ll get there early enough to get a plastic seal.

Other than those new/big adventures, the year was filled with the usual rhythm of things: playing at city parks, springtime hikes, swimming holes and cultural festivals in the summer, visits to relatives and pumpkin patches, dressing up for Halloween, kids’ birthday parties (they just keep getting older and older! And taller and taller! Only the youngest kiddo is shorter than me now), decorating for holidays and seasons, taking walks, drawing (Chris and the kids are so good at it!), writing (do check out Chris’ regular blog and posts by him and me on our church’s blog if you get a chance), playing instruments (17yo plays cello in the school orchestra, 13yo plays violin and trumpet), building Lego things, petting the cat, working hard, learning the hard way, learning from others, lamenting sad things, and all the other things that make up our lives.

Some of the teens & tweens are now pretty camera-shy, so we did not get a Christmas card-worthy family photo this year. They hide their faces when they see their picture-happy stepmom holding up the phone. What do you do? Life is not always picture-perfect. But I am grateful for this sweet family. And for our extended family, friends, and community organizations that support us. I’m hopeful that 2026 will bring more personal growth for all of us and new opportunities and adventures. May 2026 bless all of you, too.

Art & writing from Chris and me this year:

Chris wrote a post for both his personal blog and for our church’s blog about Charles Dickens. Check it out here: https://www.citysalt.org/blog/2025/12/19-charles-dickens

Here are a few of my most recent blog posts on the church blog: https://www.citysalt.org/blog/2025/10/24-beyond-the-binary-jc and https://www.citysalt.org/blog/2025/8/15-loving-our-enemies-within-jc and https://www.citysalt.org/blog/2025/6/6-evolution-of-faith-jc

Chris’ blog: https://professorpopinjay.com/ On it, you can find humor articles, pictures of his art, and his movie “non-review” posts.

Chris’ Enchanted Forest tee-shirt if you need to update your wardrobe with something fun: https://www.enchantedforest.com/product-page/adult-enchanted-forest-car-park-t-shirt

Categories: Miscellaneous | Tags: christmas, family, holidays, life, travel | Leave a comment

Walk With Her

Posted on October 19, 2025 by compassrosequeen

There are so many world-traveling women out there now and in history that I’d love to write about. But I am lucky to know personally one woman that travels more than anyone I know! Tyler Burgess has retired from years of leading walking tours around the world and teaching fitness walking classes in Eugene, but she still travels to amazing places and shares them with us in a variety of artistic media.

Tyler grew up on a ranch in Wyoming, attended the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and then lived in Montana before moving to Oregon. I’m sure the epic beauty of those states impacted her wanderlust, but she told me she was inspired to travel from hearing her mother’s stories of travel (her father who was stationed in the Pacific Islands during the war).

She founded her business “Walk With Me” in 2000. For many years, she gave walking tours in 10 different countries, taught fitness walking classes at the UofO and LCC in Eugene, coached marathon walking training, and directed four marathons.

Now she is officially retired from all that, but she is nowhere near done traveling. She packs a fold-up bicycle into her luggage for many of her trips so she can travel by bike across places like Sri Lanka. In Europe, she’s done a few different pilgrimages on the Way of St. James. She says she loves those because the local churches have been praying for the pilgrims for over 1,000 years, and the hospitality is amazing. Her son lives in Ecuador, so she has a good excuse to travel around South America, too. She says her favorite specific place to travel to is Venice. The destination isn’t the goal; she loves meeting interesting people on the way. Her most recent trip (as of the time of this writing; I started this post a while ago but she keeps going places!) was to bike across New England.

Fun fact: Tyler played a part in my going to Afghanistan before I even met her. My mom had met her years ago through the singles group at her church. When I was looking for a teaching job, Mom ran into Tyler and told her that I’d been offered a job in South Korea and one in Afghanistan, but was leaning toward Afghanistan. Despite having joined the army and going to live in Germany during the Cold War when she was half the age that I was when I went to Afghanistan (see my previous article about her journeys), Mom was understandably anxious about my decision. She asked Tyler what she thought I should do. Tyler said something like, “Oh, she should go to Kabul! What an opportunity!” Mom felt that was confirmation from God that I would be okay or at least was making the right decision. That helped me feel better about it, too, because I didn’t want to cause emotional distress for my family.

Years later, after I had returned to the U.S. and was teaching and living in the Eugene area, I found a couple of her Oregon walking guidebooks in local bookstores. One of them was about Eugene walks, complete with sketches of things she’d seen along the way. I did some of the walks from the book and loved them.

Now Tyler attends the church I do, so I am getting to know her myself! And I get invited to her travel talks. I’ve been to a few of them. It’s so neat to hear about her trips and look through her watercolor hand-painted travel journals. She also puts together fast-paced Youtube videos and writes about her trips on her blog. You can find links to those on her website https://walk-with-me.com/, but here are a couple photos I’ve taken of the pages in her travel journals. Postcards of her Oregon-themed sketches can be found in the Eugene Cascades to Coast (Travel Lane County) visitor’s center in downtown Eugene. And you can find lots of her books on Amazon, including city walk guidebooks and sketchbook diaries for some of her bigger walks like the Way of St. James in Europe.

If you’re in the Eugene area, I hope you get to meet Tyler! And if not, you can buy her books on Amazon.

Mom and Tyler at her book booth in 2024 when Mom and I did the Springfield Art Walk

Categories: Journeys of Women | Tags: life, travel, writing | Leave a comment

Wolf-Themed Trips and Back to School

Posted on October 11, 2025 by compassrosequeen

My husband and I celebrated our 3-year wedding anniversary last month, with our first kid-free overnight trip! We stayed a night at the Wolf Creek Inn, an historic site in the Oregon State Parks system. More about that later, as well as the White Wolf Sanctuary trip that we and the kids took in August. But first, a big announcement.

If you’re friends with me in the real world or Facebook, you may know this already, but I thought I’d make it official on here, too. I went back to teaching! In my “Quick Update” post this spring, I talked about getting promoted to an account manager position at the insurance brokerage firm USI. There were some aspects of that position that I really liked, but it hit me all of a sudden that I really missed teaching after three years away from it, and I’d better get back into it before it was too late.

Fortunately, one of the schools I taught at before had a position come open for this school year. Now I’m teaching two classes each of 8th & 9th grade math, one high school math support class, and a credit-recovery World Geography class for 12th graders. I’m exhausted already from trying to get back into teaching and find my groove after three years out of it (and six years out of teaching regular ed classes). But also energized by getting to work with kids again! They are so fun! I’ve already gotten a drawing from one kid, and another kid and her mom donated a neat map-themed trunk to my classroom. There are tough days, but I feel more like myself now that I’m back in the career I trained for. Chris says I come home with more interesting stories. Certainly it’s more fun (and easier on my ADHD than sitting in a cubicle). I’m very grateful.

I’m also thankful to my husband for supporting my move back to teaching. It won’t be easy for me to balance work with family, but he will help. He is so great! We enjoyed taking time out of our busy lives for our little anniversary overnight trip to Southern Oregon a few weeks ago.

Wolf Creek Inn started out as a stagecoach stop on the Applegate Trail in the 1800s. Over the years, famous visitors have included Clark Gable and Jack London. The latter wrote a short story here, and they preserved his little room as a museum piece as well as named a the peak just south of town after him. We hiked it and enjoyed the views, although it looked like the Smoky Mountains due to the Moon Fire complex. The next day, we visited the nearby ghost town of Golden (also a State Heritage park in the Oregon State Parks system) on our way out. Speaking of ghosts, Wolf Creek Inn has embraced their alleged haunted status, so they have gone all out on Halloween decor. We even found Jack London, or at least a skeleton on the bed in his museum room! It was a little overwhelming. But the place kept its charm. The ballroom upstairs wasn’t decorated as Halloween-ish, and had big tables to spread out on, so we hung out up there to work on our writing and art.

Wolf Creek Inn is also an interpretive site along the Applegate Trail, complete with covered wagon and informational signs and a picnic table. A great spot to stop for a break on a road trip. We also visited a different Applegate Trail site in Myrtle Creek on the way down that was really neat. When I lived in Myrtle Creek many years ago, I didn’t know there was a hike you could do along the ruts of the trail! It goes up a bluff with great views of the valley and South Umpqua River below. In that area, we also stopped at Pizza Palace in Tri-City so Chris could see why his pizza restaurant reminds me of it, and ate lunch at Ken’s Sidewalk Café in Canyonville. I’ve shown Chris and the kids some of my old haunts in this area before, but it was fun to show him around a bit more without the kids. Wolf Creek Inn makes a great weekend getaway!

Speaking of wolves, on my birthday in August, we got to go to the White Wolf Sanctuary in Tidewater, Oregon. It’s up in the mountains near Waldport. The trip was thanks to the Summit Award I earned at USI. We made a loop of the trip, stopping to eat at a fisherman’s market in Newport and see the giant rock formations in the ocean at Seal Rock. We arrived at the meeting spot to get to the wolf sanctuary a little late, but fortunately they waited for us. It was a very educational and neat place. One of the wolves, Nukka , was the most friendly, letting us see her up close in her giant pen. She was beautiful. And she knew it. She would strut around and pose for us to admire her, reminding us of my cat Arwen. So cute! Thanks to USI for this experience!

This new (school!) year will be busy, so I may not get to write as much for a while. I’ve got a couple articles drafted and will get one of them out very soon (see below for preview). If you’re wanting some fall scenery ideas in the Eugene/Springfield area, be sure to check out my post of autumn photos from this past winter, a few posts ago.

Recently I’ve discovered a couple blogs that I think you’d enjoy. I’ll list them here along with websites and blogs from two very interesting local friends of mine.

http://www.walk-with-me.com – my friend Tyler’s website (with link to her blog on it). My next post is complete, and it’s about her fascinating life! She is an author and artist and led walking tours around the world for years. Stay tuned in a day or two for more about her, but if you can’t wait, check out her website.

jeromycilley.com – my former coworker at USI has had a very interesting life, too. He has some unique hobbies that he shares on his website/blog, including making music and hunting for animal skulls.

http://www.adventurouskate.com – Kate teaches women how to travel on their own.

http://www.thewanderingqueen.com – Michelle teaches women how to hike and backpack.

Categories: My Trips and Tips | Tags: family, hiking, life, nature, travel | Leave a comment