Stargazer's Garage

On our way down to Seattle on the I-5, I saw this in my rear view mirror, an Aston Martin DB9: You can imagine my envy seeing this DB9 (a fellow Canadian) passing us by with some open road ahead: I especially love the Aston Martin Vanquish which I think is an awesome name and one of the most beautiful cars in the world. Of course when it came to naming our fourth daughter.... ...Vanquish wouldn't have been appropriate at all. So her name became Aston. Here she is at the Portland Children's Museum in Oregon happily defying death at the jaws of a big-toothed in amphibian in need of a cleaning. At the end of the week after our road trip, my wife had her ultrasound and we found out that the girls are going to get a little brother. Maybe I should name him Martin so that I can complete the series ;0)

We went on a 3-night road trip to Portland, Oregon at the end of July and here's a summary of the fuel consumption in our 2006 Honda Odyssey Touring . Total distance: 1842.6 km (1144.9 miles) Total fuel used: 203.2 L (53.7 US gallons) Total cost of fuel: $152.16 USD Average combined (city/highway) consumption: 9.7 L/100km (24.3 mpg) Best combined average: 25.0 mpg Worst combined average: 23.6 mpg This is a lot better than we got on our road trip last year ( Road Trip 2007 Fuel Consumption ) because.... ...this year we did a lot less city driving, packed a lot less luggage, and did not have the roof box on top of the Odyssey.

Overheard at the 0:29 mark: "These aren't real, right?" On the afternoon of Day 2 of our Oregon trip we walked across the street from.... ...the Portland Children's Museum to see the Dinosaur exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. It was pretty neat and the robotic animals were impressive and definitely scary for the younger kids!

Red Lobster, Salem, Oregon Originally uploaded by istargazer . We went down to Oregon last week for a few nights and no trip to the United States would be complete without a trip to a Red Lobster restaurant :0) This was Day 2 after spending the day at the Portland Children's Museum to tie-dye some T-shirts and the Oregon Zoo to see their robotic Dinosaur exhibit. We stopped at the Woodburn Company Stores outlet mall to exchange a shirt I had bought and went down to Salem for dinner. Service was very good and super fast and the food was delicious! I brought along my Sony GPS data logger again, but I've had some problems matching up the photos with the data. I guess I hadn't used it in about a year and the unit had a hard time syncing with the nav satellites. All the data was offset buy a few hours. I'll try to upload the other pictures when I get a chance. This picture is geotagged but I did it manually through Google Earth. You can view it on the Flickr Map .