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Family

Christmas in Indiana

Living thousands of miles from where I grew up, it’s amazing to me how often we’re able to get back there. My parents were gracious enough to host the whole gang for Christmas yet again. There was a tiny bit of snow when we arrived and then it warmed up making travel simple. We made good use of the clear roads by heading down to see my 94-year-old Grandpa. Other than that, we had a couple church services, board games, good food, a chocolate factory with bison and dinosaurs, and a pile o’ presents. And oh yeah, Luke brought a giant 1.3 gallon beer to go with Dad’s craft beer sampler pack mountain.

I’ve gotten in the habit of putting together a quick video recap of the trip. It’s probably not super interesting to anyone else, but we enjoy looking back at them.

And here are a few pictures from the trip as well:

benmartens January 9, 2025 Family, Travel

Moses Lake for a Weekend

While we did just get back from a great trip, we decided to squeeze one more in before the weather gets rainy. I don’t remember how it started but we have a random family goal of visiting all the counties in Washington together. With that in mind, we headed east. For those of you not familiar with our state, you may picture Washington state as wet and cloudy. That’s true on the west side of the state between October and May but the east side of the estate is a desert. There are literally tumbleweeds blowing around. It’s a dramatic change with just an hour drive east over the mountains.

Our base of operations was Moses Lake, but the drive out there was slower than expected because the I-90 bridge over the Columbia River is being worked on for the next couple months. We sat through a 5-mile, 75 minute backup squeezing down to one lane. Oops.

Saturday morning we headed north for Grand Coulee Dam. Tyla and I have been there before but Elijah had never seen it. Grand Coulee Dam is mind-boggling big. It was originally created to supply a huge part of central Washington with irrigation but now it also supplies power for about 2 million homes per year. There are lots of stats, but suffice it to say the ~1 mile long dam is one of the biggest concrete structures in the world and the 10th most powerful hydroelectric dam (3.2 times more powerful than the famous Hoover Dam.) We got there for the first tour at 10am, but unfortunately the tour has really been neutered even after the initial changes after 9/11. You no longer get to visit the generator area. The tour briefly takes you down to the pumping facility which is interesting but too short. The rest of the tour is a drive across the top of the dam with a stop walk around at the top. I guess it’s still worth doing if you’re there, but don’t make that the key point of your day. Luckily for us, it was just one piece of the puzzle!

After the tour we had lunch at the apparently brand new Billups Sub Co. It was delicious but way more expensive than I was expecting. We got our food to go and ate it at a nearby park that had free EV charging (more on that in a later post.)

After lunch we headed northeast to Koontzville and then east to Highway 21. I don’t think we saw any other cars on that part of the drive and a forest fire had ravaged the area only a couple months before. It was quite a sight. Once on Hwy 21, we headed south to the Keller Ferry. This ferry is tiny compared to the ones we’re used to in the Puget Sound. It only holds 20 cars! The north dock is movable and gets moved upriver to a different spot when the river is too low. There’s no schedule and no fee for the 10 minute crossing. This sounds like a simple part of the trip, but we all said it was our favorite!

From the south ferry dock, we headed straight back to our hotel in Moses Lake for some swimming, food, and rest. Our drive back home went smoothly and we got through the construction in Vantage, WA before it had backed up at all. After getting through that, we did stop at the Thorp Fruit & Antique Mall. It was fun to go inside afer driving by so many times. We came back with a box of apples, but if you’re looking for really good deals, I think you should look elsewhere. It wasn’t bad but it felt like a mildly good sale at the grocery store, not the kind of deal you get buying straight out of a field.

So none of those activities were monumental but it added up to a nice weekend and some more family memories to add to the pile.

benmartens September 26, 2024 Family, Travel

2024 PDGA Portland Open

In addition to playing disc golf fairly regularly, Elijah and I have watched a lot of the pro tournaments online. They have a subscription network for live coverage, but we generally watch an edited version of the final round for free on the JomezPro YouTube channel. Most of the tournaments are in the midwest and southeast but there were a couple Oregon tournaments on this year’s schedule, so last weekend we made a day trip to Portland for day 3 of the 2024 Portland Open.

I didn’t really know what to expect and it was going to be a long day (6 hours in the car plus ~8 hours at the tournament) so I was hoping for the best. I had so many questions starting with “What is parking going to be like?” There wasn’t a lot of info available ahead of time about parking but I was thrilled to see that we could just street park within about a 5 minute walk of the course!

The tournament schedule had the ladies teeing off first followed by the guys. Elijah’s disc golf teacher was in one of the first groups of ladies to tee off and that had happened a couple hours before we got there. After checking scores on my phone, we made a beeline back to hole 16. There was almost no one around and we weren’t even sure we were in the right area, but then we saw his teacher come through. She spotted after teeing off and came running over to give Elijah a hug! We watched her through the final holes and got to chat with her after. She made Elijah feel super special and even took him up onto the #1 tee between groups to get a great photo by one of the big PDGA sign boards. You can see it on her Instagram account.

After walking around the booths and grabbing some lunch, we watched the top ladies groups finish up on hole 18. Then we headed over to hole 1 and parked ourselves in a great spot with some shade but also great views of the green.

It ended up being a magical spot. One of the first groups we watched had Niklas Anttila in it (one of Elijah’s favorites.) As Niklas walked by, he fist bumped Elijah and blew Elijah’s mind! It was a tiny act but the unnecessary kindness of it was so wonderful.

That was more than we expected but it certainly wasn’t the end. When Andrew Presnell came through, his caddy handed Elijah a signed trading card. And then when Ricky Wysocki came through, his caddy rummaged around in his bag for quite a while and came out with a Ricky t-shirt in Elijah’s size! Elijah immediately put it on and Ricky gave him a big smile as he walked by. Just being close to all the people he watches on TV was a hit but these extra interactions sent him over the moon. In this image below, we are back against the trees just to the left of the guy’s disc in his hand in front in front of the person in the red shirt.

We watched everyone come through and then we headed further out on the course to watch a few more players come through before finally settling on hole 18 to watch everyone come through again. It was about 10 minutes between groups but Elijah never once talked about being bored or tired even though it was about 8 hours on the course in total.

If Elijah had to pick one player as his favorite, it would probably be Calvin Heimburg. Calvin was in the second to last group. We got to watch him make a stellar eagle on the last hole. You can see us in this photo below to the left of the basket. We are all standing and Elijah has an aqua colored shirt on. Or watch this video for a longer clip of the video that this screenshot was taken from. You can see Elijah jump up and cheer.

If you kept watching that video clip to see Calvin’s putt, you might have noticed that Tyla and Elijah were gone. (I was standing there recording a phone video like a dork.) Earlier in the day, Elijah had picked out a Calvin Heimburg disc as his souvenier. After the round, he waited in line to get it signed by Calvin and even got a picture with him too!

As I mentioned, it was a long day and we were wiped out by the time we got home. The morning drive wasn’t too bad but it would have been really nice to have a hotel that evening. I was really thankful for the autosteer feature on the Tesla as it took a lot of pressure off both of the drives.

If you can’t tell by now, we were very impressed with the event. Yes, disc golf is still a niche sport, but they put on an excellent show. You can tell they’re putting a ton of effort into really polishing it as much as possible. But since it’s still picking up steam, it’s very easy to attend an event like this and tickets were only $21 (plus Elijah got in free.) The only time when a crowd was minorly annoying was on the final hole of the day with the final group, but realistically it was probably only 200-300 people. I was still able to see just fine, and there was zero traffic leaving the event.

Most of these same players will be playing next week a little farther south in Oregon. We’re excited to do this again sometime, but that’s probably a little too soon. We’ll have our eyes on the schedule next year though! Most events are east of the Mississippi but it’s nice to see a couple within driving distance for us.

A huge thank you goes from our family to everyone who made our day special, but especially Corey! She made Elijah feel like a VIP!

benmartens June 6, 2024 Family, Sports, Travel

Legends Confidence App Review

I don’t know about other parents, but Tyla and I often chat about ways to help Elijah build confidence. That’s probably what made the “Legends” app catch my attention. It’s a paid app, but that link includes a referral code which currently gets you a free month and we started with a similar code.

The idea is that you sit down with your child (ages 7-11) for about 5-7 minutes every day and go through the next coaching session. The coach is funny and approachable and many of the sessions draw on lessons from celebrities. For example, it might be helpful to know that Kobe Bryant wasn’t always good at basketball, he just worked harder than everyone else. Or it might help to know that Billie Eilish has to deal with anxiety about performing on stage. There are usually quick activities with the lessons like coming up with things you can say to downplay negative self-talk or words you can use to build yourself up.

I don’t know if we’ll continue to subscribe to the service or for how long, but this first free month has been great. I wouldn’t say Elijah necessarily looks forward to it, but he has never once given me the eye roll when I suggest that we do our daily session. That’s saying a lot.

So yes, the app is wonderful and I recommend it, but as a Christian I found myself wishing that there was more to it. It’s the same feeling I get when I listen to any secular self-help/counseling type of content. Jesus is the ultimate source of comfort, confidence, and peace. Without him, you’re grasping at straws. The whole experience made me wish that I had the time and skillset to work with some people in our church body to create something in a similar space but combine it with the Bible.

benmartens May 16, 2024 Family

Leaping Lamb Farm Stay Review

You may remember that back in 2022 we spent a few days at a farm in Oregon. Shortly after we left, we booked another trip and this time we intentionally booked it for spring in hopes of seeing baby sheep and goats. Spring of 2023 was booked out so we had to book a year and a half out. I thought the wait might be too much for Tyla, but she made it.

We spent four nights at their cottage and had a blast again! Denny and Kate were the farm managers while we were there last time and unfortunately, they had moved on, but we enjoyed meeting farm owner Scottie and new farm manager TK. The last time we magically had the farm to ourselves but this time the bigger farmhouse had about 10 guests in it, but the farm is plenty big for everyone to spread out.

The goats were all born by the time we got there, but some of them were still very young. They were easily the highlight of the trip. Tyla and Elijah spent hours holding the goats and playing with them. Elijah would even go over to the goat yard by himself sometimes because he couldn’t get enough.

There were a lot of baby lambs already but six more were born on our first night. They give birth on their own without human intervention so it was a bit of a surprise every morning to walk out and see if there were any new babies. We helped tag some of them and castrate one of the boys. There were a lot of good opportunities to talk biology with Elijah!

Going in the spring was quite different than the summer. We traded time in the creek and wandering the property for time with the baby animals. Both were great experiences and we’d be hard pressed to choose which was our favorite. We’ll have to figure it out though because I’m sure we’ll be going back at some point!

Some pictures are included below but you can see more on Instagram @benwmartens.

benmartens April 18, 2024 Family, Travel

Martens Memorial Day 1995

Our final installation in the series of videos from our Memorial Day family gatherings is from 1995. It looks like this Uncle Dean and Aunt Sandy’s family couldn’t come and apparently we didn’t take out the camera much. Most of the tape was a science show that Ryan and I recorded. We had quite a few different experiments with explanations of the science behind each one. I have mercifully cut most of that out of this quick recap for you.

Here is a quick reference list for all the YouTube videos:
Memorial Day 1990
Memorial Day 1991
Memorial Day 1993
Memorial Day 1995

benmartens April 11, 2024 Family, Throwback Thursday, Video

Martens Memorial Day 1991

Last week I posted about our family Memorial Day celebrations from 1990, and now I finished editing another one. There are four of these total so I’ll see if I can do one a week. This next one is from 1991 and it was a year when it was warm enough to go swimming. It probably wasn’t very warm, but it was enough for us to enjoy swimming with cousins.

benmartens March 28, 2024 Family, Throwback Thursday, Video