Back on the road again and moving north, we slipped just over the border of Oregon to the small town of Cave Junction- actually we are about 10 miles outside of the town in the middle of nowhere. Mark had planned this stay at the beginning of the tour and whilst many things had changed due to events, mostly out our control, this stop had remained constant. We are staying at the “Treesort” at the Out’n’About farm (you can see more about this place at http://www.treehouses.com/). We pulled the motor home off the paved road and took it down the extremely lumpy track leading to the Treesort and it almost shook the poor thing to death, things came flying out of the cupboards and at one point it felt as if the whole thing would tip over. When we pulled up Jack and Emily had no idea where we were and thought their mad parents had bought them to stay in a field. But once they saw the tree house we were staying in and the swings, the dogs and the horses that was it – we didn’t see them for the rest of the day. Emily of course was besotted by the dogs; Ginger, a gorgeous Chow/ German Shepard mix, Frida, a Rhodesian Ridgeback and Tank the Jack Russell.
Our home for the next few days is a tree house, quaintly named the Pleasantree, which is about 40 feet up in the air. To get to it you have to climb two spiral staircases and cross two very wobbly rope bridges. The tree house is very cosy with bunks for Jack and Emily and a mezzanine floor accessed by a ladder for the grown-ups. The mezzanine ceiling is very low (about 3 foot high) so space is a premium. Mind you we do have a sink, a toilet and a non-working shower in our tree house. Fortunately there is a spacious and welcoming guest house for us to retreat to and a cookhouse within which we rustle up our meals . Our favourite though is the fire pit that most guests collect around in the evening to chat while the children run riot around the farm yard. Luckily breakfast is included and the breakfast "fairy" serves up some wonderful food; quiche, frittata, delicious muffins and more.
Today, our second day at Treesort we decided to fill the children’s day up to keep them busy whilst the grown-ups just relaxed. So firstly we send them out on a horse ride with Tessa the owner’s daughter. Both Jack and Emily love horse riding and seemed totally unconcerned that they were going off on their own into the woods with a complete stranger. Around an hour later they return totally happy having tromped through the woods on their loyal steeds. In the afternoon we had arranged for them to take a class in mosaic tile making; this we considered to be part of their curriculum for art on our home-schooling schedule!!! Our final treat for the day was a course on zip wires. For those of you not familiar with this mode of transport it is a pretty simple, you put on a harness, climb to a high place, attach yourself to a wire and slide down. Easy!!! Well, on this day Out’n’About was being filmed by a crew from the Travel Channel making a programme called “Extreme Holidays” and we were to be a part of the filming. Joining us on this course we a lovely young couple, Rachel and Burt, from Washington State.
Being filmed was good and bad. Good- as it was exciting to be filmed, bad -in the sense of we had to do things at the pace of the filming process. The first couple of zip lines we went on were not too bad, the second of which meant climbing up a platform 25 feet off the ground and taking off. From here it got hairier. The next platform was 50 feet up a tree with no steps, the only way to get up (or so we thought) was to climb the tree (with ropes) or hoist yourself up on ropes. Jack was the first up, taking the climbing option, but he quite quickly decided he didn’t like this and was asking to come down. After some persuasion and help, Jack ,to his credit, made it to the top of 
the platform and gratefully took the zip wire down. Next was Emily who decided to haul herself up on the ropes and she slowly but surely made it up to the platform. The people running the course decided that there was no way that either of us grown-ups would make it up so we were taken up a hill and then put on a zip wire that hurtled us through the trees across the field to the platform where Emily and Jack had climbed. This platform was 50 feet up in the air and no more than about 5 feet square. By the time we Hoblets were on it with Rachel, Burt, the instructor and the lady from the film crew, another Rachel (who had a camera on her head) it was a crowded space and some of us – particularly Emily and Karen were terrified. One by one we took the zip line down to terra firma. By the end of the course we were glad to be down, but we had had the most wonderful, if somewhat terrifying experience.....and we can relive it all when the programme comes out later in the year!
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