We spent out first night in
Sandpoint, Idaho. The second day we drove through Spokane, the Tri-cities, Hood
River and then began the beautiful drive past Mount Hood, Multnomah Falls to
the end of the Oregon Trails – Oregon City and another fifteen miles further to
Canby, OR arriving early evening.
We drove straight to the
Shellrude’s (District Superintendent) and picked up the key to our new rental
house. All our worldly possessions had been delivered to the garage. Ralph and
Marion had taken the time to make sure the house was already clean. There were
beds set up and all we needed to do was find the bedding and go to sleep. We
returned for supper with my new boss and his wife.
 |
| Canby Grove Conference Center - Historic Center |
In the next few days we got the
house set up, visited the church on Sunday where Tim Barton was now acting
senior pastor, and I got oriented to my new. I set up a schedule to try and
swing through the district and visit most of the churches in the first two
months. Just thought it might be best to go to them, see their place of
ministry and introduce myself.
Canby was a small town on the
Willamette River, which flowed north into the Columbia. The river is the Willamette,
not the Williamette like most newcomers want to say – including me. I added the
letter “i”. Never do that unless you want to be laughed at like I was.
We took a few days just driving
around the area, figuring out what stores were available and checking out the
two grocery stores. One was locally owned (Cuttsforth
Thriftway) and the other an area chain (Roth’s
IGA). Della liked the IGA better because of the customer service. That was
not an acceptable choice to the old timers. “We must support local businesses.
We didn’t, the first of several rebellions.
We had less than a month to get
our kids registered for school. Canby elementary schools were on a year around
system and the next new round began in September. The big problem was that our
visas had not come through yet and we could not register them without the
visas.
Senator Ted Kulongoski (D-OR) was
running for reelection and advertized for residents needing help to call his
office. Since we could not even find where we were in the visa application
process, I called. One of his assistants took our situation seriously and
learned the application was sitting in Calgary. What? We asked that it be sent
to Vancouver. It wasn’t. The assistant got the visas on fast track and sent
them to Vancouver so we could make the trip north quickly. She got the whole
process ready for us to drive to sign the final papers in three weeks.
It was a very fast trip. At the Vancouver
immigration office we were send to have passport photos taken – again, then
come back. We did and sat as the only Caucasians in a large room full of Asians
immigrating to the USA. We got our papers and headed back to Peace Portal to
enter the country legally. The processing line took forever to get to the guard
station and when we got there, we had to go in to have our papers checked
because there was something wrong – the passport photos were incorrect. I was
upset. We had them taken twice.
“What do we do now?”, I asked “We don’t normally do this, but we can
take the photos here.” They did take them and they took them for free. I paid
twice for incorrect photos. They had to be a three quarter face shots with the
left ear devoid of hair and clearly visible. It was very precise. After this
was all done, we compared the photos and could not tell the difference between
any of them. Grrrr!
It was done. The kids were
registered two days later and began school the following Monday. We finally
were there legally.
No comments:
Post a Comment