Country Dancing and Crab Festivals

Saturday the 26th a crew of us from the hostel headed to a Country Dance at the Netel Grange near Astoria, Oregon. The building was set back several miles up into the mountains and seemed to be a world away from Seaside and the coast! Keith was a busy boy, escorting four ladies to the dance.

Here he and I (Nora) are getting ready to dance a sqaure dance:




And here he and Weibke dance the Waltz.



Here is a group photo with Weibke, me, Keith, Trung, Jeanie. Pretty sweaty after all that dancing!


The next Country Dance will be held May 31. It should be a great time. Come on out and join us!

I'm also looking to see if I can find any information about Salsa and Latin Dancing. So if anybody reading this has heard of Latin Dancing somewhere on the Oregon coast, let me know. Thanks!

This weekend was also the Crab, Seafood, and Wine festival up in Astoria. There were all sorts of arts and crafts there besides the obvious food and wine... and Trung brought a drum to add to our musical instrument collection. The drum is super fun to bang on... but don't worry... we'll observe the "quiet time" rules. Ha!

There will be a Weekend Surf Camp for women held here in Seaside June 6-8 for which all participants will stay here at the hostel. It is open to women of all ages and abilities and should be a good time. If you are interested, check out www.coastalseattle.com or www.northwestwomenssurfcamps.com.

April 25, 2008 - And So It Begins

Hello everyone! Welcome to the Seaside Blog. This is Nora, a resident worker bee from the hostel. I hope to have bios and pictures up for each person that works here shortly. Rather than rehash where the hostel is/what it is about, I will instead assume you have stayed here, or direct you to the link www.seasidehostel.net to learn more about us. =)

In the mean time, I'll let you in on some of the happenings from the past month, and let you know what is in store for us in the near future!

First, a few additions to the hostel:

If you have stayed with us before, you know that our dining room is very multipurpose. We like to call it our art room. (Culinary art, musical art, visual art, whatever you can dream up!) Well, on march 21, we added a wall of mirrors. The mirrors really open the room up and make it appear bigger and brighter. A perfect place to spend a rainy day! Now you can watch yourself limber up while doing yoga with Trung in our morning sessions from 7 to 7:30.

Then on March 30, another addition was made to the art room. An organ was gifted to us from an estate in Cannon Beach! A wonderful group from Germany gave us the use of their van and helped us get the organ moved to its new home in the Art room.

In April, a group of Wilderness Volunteers stayed with us. Besides planting trees all week, they helped us get our printer back in order and a guitar restrung. We now have a piano (which has been getting plenty of use by me) and two guitars ready for use in our living room. What a blessing to have all these interesting people come stay with us and help out!

April has seen a lot of rain and some blessed sunshine as we work our way towards summer... it rained all week until finally, the weather broke on April 23 and Weibke (the blond german girl in the picture below) and I got to watch a gorgeous sunset.




April 26 there is a Contra Dance just north of here - at the Netel Grange from 8 PM to 11 PM - for which a big group of us plan on attending. More pictures to come!

P.S. Hello Chris from Australia, or Canada, or England... or wherever you consider yourself from these days... thanks for taking the above picture... and would you like the honor of being the first to comment on this blog?