It seemed like a good idea at the time..... we were slowing killing one of our plants that needed a bigger pot and we had just gotten our IKEA catalog in the mail, so we thought, "Hey! Let's go look at pots at IKEA!" A giant IKEA just opened near the airport at the end of July.
If you've never been to an IKEA warehouse before, it's set up like this:
You walk in and you see an escalator up to the second floor. You go up the escalator and then weave your way through a showroom full of rooms laid out similar to the catalog. If you like something, you write down the location of the item in the storeroom/warehouse on the first floor.
Then, you take an escalator down to the first floor to do your shopping. IKEA is cheap. Really cheap. By putting items out in the boxes they came in and by making all the furniture "assemble-it-yourself," they keep their prices low. After you weave through the storeroom, you enter the warehouse where you pick up your furniture in flat boxes and you end up at a long line of registers.
The system is fairly genius. By making you walk through everything set up in a room, it makes you want to buy everything to complete the look. All of a sudden you find yourself saying, "we need that white vase with the bumps on it to match the white rug, which will play nicely off the dots on the ottoman slipcover." But the problem lies in the fact that there were THOUSANDS of people in there. THOUSANDS. Weaving your way through was more like being herded. While the system is genius, it's not very convenient for people who shop like Bryan and me: complusive mind-changers. You can't go back and look at something you've already seen. If you do try, you are going against the flow of THOUSANDS of people being herded your way.
FOUR hours later, we were out the front door with what we came for, a pot for our dying palm, but also a new bookshelf. Because we absolutely needed the bookshelf because it matched the glaze on the pot........ :)
Mountain biking around Timothy Lake.
Central Oregon Native Americans are the only people allowed to fish along this stretch of the Deschutes River. They stand on these platforms and lean over with big nets. We watched a guy haul in several huge salmon in about 15 minutes.
The whole group after the day on the river-- me, Ashley, Julia, Geoff, Rob and Bryan.