Harvey and Helen:

I am Harvey (Pictake) age 71 and my dear wife of 50 years is Helen (70). We will celebrate our 50th anniversary on October 6th of this year. We have had a great 50 years.

I spent the first 12 years of my life in the little town of Petersburg, Texas. My great grandfather started this little town and had the first store and post office there. I lived there before moving to Oregon at age 12 with my family.

When we came to Medford in 1946, it was only 13,000 population and now is 63,000. Helen is a native Oregonian and was born in Chiloquin, Oregon to a father who was from Norway and a mother from Oklahoma. I graduated from Medford High and then received a Business Degree from Abilene Christian College (University now) in 1956. We got married in Texas at the start of my senior year. I then spent two years in the Army at Ft Sam Houston, Texas and our two sons were born there. I went to work for my Father who was an Insurance Agent and Real Estate Broker. I eventually bought the Insurance agency from him and later sold to a larger agency and went to work for them. I did not make a lot of money but had a great relation with a lot of customers - some of them for 30 years or more. I also had the flexibility of time to attend the kids' sports and other activities. Our daughter was born in 1962. Helen went back to college in 1968 when our youngest was in Kindergarten and got her teaching degree. She later got her Masters. She taught for 25 years in grade school. She was an excellent, innovative teacher. She taught 6th grade first, then had a group of 4th-5th-6th talented and gifted kids for several years and finished up the last few years as a 3rd grade teacher. Our activities over the years were concerned with school, work, kids and church activities. We were able to do some limited traveling including going to the Oregon Coast either camping or moteling. Unfortunately our WorldMark membership came along after our kids were grown. Helen and I have enjoyed our WM membership to the fullest and continue to enjoy it every year.

FEATURED OWNERS QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

How long have you been a member of WorldMark?
We purchased our WM in January 1998 from Tony at the Running Y in Klamath Falls.
We have been to the following resorts:
Running Y (12)
Discovery Bay
Birch Bay (2)
Sundance
Angels Camp
Gleneden
Depoe Bay (6)
Eagle Crest (2)
Bass Lake
Canadian (2)
Cascade Lodge
North Shore
Seaside (2)
Victoria
London Trip (Feb 2000)

What is your favorite WorldMark resort? What do you like about it?
Our favorite is Depoe Bay. We love it because of the closeness to the ocean and the crashing waves against rocks both for the sight of it and the sound of it. It is great to watch both in the daytime and at night whenlights are shining on it. We always leave the windows or doors open at night to hear the ocean while we are going to sleep. Also, you are guaranteed of getting that view no matter which unit you get. That said, we really like all of the WM resorts we have been to because each of them has its own special enjoyment. We usually get a 2 or 3 bedroom and there is so much room even when we have several people with us. I really love to take pictures of the many different scenes it gives you. I have used the video camera and just run it for a few minutes sometimes to capture the sounds, and then when we get home we can play it back and enjoy it all over again.

What things do you like to do when visiting this resort?
We like to just sit at the resort and relax and enjoy the ocean and the waves. We like to look for whales though we are not patient enough to see many. We enjoy going to the little stores in Depoe Bay and looking and buying once in a while. They have a pretty good variety of things and the prices are much more reasonable than in a lot of resorts. We enjoy watching the boats come in and out of the little harbor. We enjoy the various restaurants in the area who offer good dining including Tidal Raves, Whale Cove Inn Restaurant and the Kernville Steakhouse on the Siletz River. We drive to Newport to visit the aquarium, old town, lighthouses, the boat activity in the bay and various other features. Helen really likes the Outlet Mall in Lincoln City. We occasionally drive up to Tillamook the back way along the coast to the cheese factory. We enjoy tasting the variety of cheeses and that great Tillamook ice cream. There is an interesting Air Museum just south of Tillamook which is housed in the huge Dirigible hangar.

Would you share some of your favorite vacation web links and/or photos from this resort and the surrounding area?
Here is a link to our pictures of Depoe Bay:

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AcMnDhq1YtGOQ

Tell us about the people that you travel with - are they family? Friends? Coworkers? If you have children, what are their travel preferences?
Helen and I most often travel by ourselves to the resorts. However we have taken our kids and grandkids at various times. We have shared with brothers and sisters. We were able to share with Helen's 3 sisters and a brother at a Chalet at the Running Y. We have sent our kids to the resorts on their own. Two of our good friends went to Kauai, rented a house and asked us to spend the week with them. They had a car and had been to the island several times and gave us a great tour of the island. We were then able to share time with them at Southshore Tahoe. A pretty good tradeoff! All of them have been very impressed and have enjoyed the resorts. It is really great to be able to share with family and friends - but also nice to be able to get away just the two of us together.

What is your most exciting vacation memory?
We have had some nice vacation memories but there is one that stands out. In February 2000 we went on the WM trip to London for 6 nights. It was a terrific deal because it only cost us 25,000 points and it included airfare, hotel including breakfasts, and a couple of tours while we were there. Now I notice that they want 35,000 or 40,000 points and that does not even include the air fare. This was our first and only foreign vacation (other than Canada). We stayed in the Cumberland Hotel which is right across the street from Hyde Park and the "Speakers Corner". We were about half a mile down the street from Buckingham Palace. We were able to take a double decker bus tour of London, go to Westminster Abby, take a ride down the Thames to Greenwich and rode the "tube" to go to hear the London Symphony. We also visited Stonehenge, the Town of Bathe, Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford on Avon and visit Warwick Castle. Very enjoyable because Helen is a great English History buff and knew a lot about a lot of the places we saw.

Have you ever had some kind of "vacation disaster" threaten to ruin your trip?
No, we actually have never had such an experience. I have to say that ever resort that we have been to has been a good experience. One trip we took to Seaside, Vancouver, Victoria, Birch Bay and the annual meeting we had a lot of rain but the rain was spaced out and it did not rain on us at the time we wanted to go somewhere like Butchart Gardens.

What activities do you and your family enjoy besides vacationing?
We really enjoy just driving and exploring. We have driven many of the back roads and forest service roads here in our local area. We have never had a 4 wheel drive vehicle but we have taken our regular car many places that we should have had a 4 wheel drive. We also enjoy exploring drives that are near the resorts we go to like at Depoe Bay when we drove up the Siletz River to the town of Siletz and came back around and came out at Newport. Helen is an avid reader and reads all the time. Also she enjoys taking some of our pictures and using her teacher poster board skills to make little paper frames around them and put them up on our walls. We have several walls covered (and I do mean covered) with various family pictures so that we can enjoy looking at them whenever we want. We also very much enjoy getting together with family, both immediate and extended. In September she has Norwegian cousins coming over here and we will all get together up near Oregon City to meet and visit with them.

Do you have a hobby? What is it that makes it special to you?
Well of course my one great hobby is taking pictures and I spend a lot of time on that. I usually take a print and a video camera with me just about anywhere I go. I often tell people that the cameras are a part of my anatomy and they go where I go. I got my first 35 mm camera when Helen and I were dating. I have taken pictures as a chronicle of our lives. I have recorded our college, dating, (couldn't very well take pictures at our wedding) but did get the honeymoon, and our 3 kids, their marriages, their kids and their granddaughter. (We have two boys and a girl and we have 8 grandkids and one great grandchild.) I estimated, roughly counting my pictures that I have taken somewhere around 17,000 pictures during that time. Between my pictures and Helen's books we are running out of room in our little house. I acquired a video camera about 6 or 7 years ago and have recorded somewhere around 300 hours of video. I, for years have taken pictures at family and friends weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties and I take the casual pictures that the regular photographer does not get. I then give them a set of pictures as our gift to them. Fortunately about 30 years ago I figured out a way to mark the pictures and I file them chronologically. I usually can go find a picture within about 15 minutes if I know the approximate date. I get a lot of enjoyment taking and using the pictures. I take pictures on all of our trips and I figure when we get to where we are not able to travel any more, we can get our pictures out and go on these trips again in our living room.

Other than a WorldMark destination, what is your favorite place to visit for rest and relaxation?
As our kids were growing up our favorite place to go was Bandon, Oregon (which has been mentioned many times on the forum as a place for WM to have a resort and I completely agree.). They have what I consider about the best beach of anywhere. There is a cliff that overlooks a big wide flat beach and there are lots of interesting rocks including "Face Rock" and a cave or two. It is long and very wide and the water comes in quite shallow for a long way and we did not worry too much about the kids playing in the water. Another place that reminds me somewhat of Depoe Bay is Yachats OR (Ya-hots) - The Fireside Inn. It is close to the water with lots of rocks and crashing waves.

If you could choose to live anywhere in the world, where would that be and why?
Well that is easy for us. We would choose to live right here in Medford, Oregon. I really do not know of anywhere else that I would want to live. We have a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains and rivers and creeks. We have reasonably moderate weather (a little warm part of the summer but air conditioning works well) We have a University and a community college here. We have the Shakespeare Festival and the Britt Music festival here. We are about 275 miles from Portland and about 375 from San Francisco, about 125 miles from the Pacific Ocean and very important, we are only 65 miles from The Running Y. Also we are only 75 miles from Crater Lake which we visit regularly We have lived right here in this house for 40 years (on August 15th). (We really move around a lot!)

How did you choose to become a WorldMark owner?
We had never been interested in a timeshare because we did not want to be limited to a specific week in a specific place every year. When we discovered the flexibility of WM, then we became very interested. My younger sister & her husband are WM members and gave us bonus time at Eagle Crest for our 42nd anniversary. It really sold us on WM and when we got an invitation in January 1998 to come to Klamath Falls with free motel at the Red Lion and a nice dinner, we jumped at the chance. We had a good presentation by Tony and we then purchased 12,000 credits. We later purchased another 3000 so that we would be able to pass 5000 on to each of our three kids. That amount has served us very well because we go at the first part of the week, go in the off seasons most of the time and use Bonus time. Best investment we have ever made - maybe not monetary wise but enjoyment wise. We have taken far more vacations than we ever had before or would have taken if we did not have WM.

What do you enjoy most about being a WorldMark owner?
We enjoy so much that we have a lot of resorts that are in a very reasonable driving distance for us. We like so much that we know that we can count on having a very nice unit fully equipped that will always be an enjoyable stay. The bonus time is such a good option that can be used if we are prudent about when we apply for it. We like that it definitely feels like home. We so enjoy the great locations like Victoria, Vancouver, Whistler, Depoe Bay, The Running Y, Bass Lake etc.

What do you like best about this WMO website community you have helped create?
It is just a very friendly place with so many people helping other people to understand how to best use our WM. We have some of the smartest and most talented people to help us figure out things and they figure out websites to make life easier. It is like one big family and we feel that we know the regular members quite well even though we have not met most of them face to face. It is a regular part of my day. (I do spend too much time here. I wonder how people that are still working find time to be on as much as they are.)

What suggestions do you have to enhance it?
It is great. About the only little thing that frustrates me a bit is that I always go to" posts since last visit". That works great but I lose it sometimes when I have to leave by my own decision but also sometimes when I happen to go to a website someone is referring me to and then when I come back I have lost all the list that I was looking at and have to go to the individual posts and try to find them individually by the date and time. It would be nice if there was some way that we could hold that list in place until we were ready to delete it or release it.

Do you have any ideas for contests and giveaways that we could possibly incorporate in the future?
No, I really don't have any suggestions here. Contests usually are not of much interest to me.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to share with you.

I have enjoyed the previous Featured owners so much and look forward to the new ones each month. This is a good idea.

click on thumbnail for a large picture

Harvey and Helen