The Honeymooners, Day Two

I would have been thrilled to spend all three days of our trip skiing, but this was not a good season for snow in Oregon.  I guess Boston got it all?  Before we left Virginia, I'd checked snow reports and weather forecasts, and I was disappointed to learn that not only was the snow really thin, but it would probably be too warm for good skiing anyway.

On the other hand, I hadn't been skiing since I left Bend, and I was due, dammit.  I didn't need good skiing.  I just needed to ski. 

Part of the sign at Chow, renowned for their breakfasts.

I also needed to eat.  Luckily, Chow opens at 6, and our brains were still mostly on East Coast time, so we were ready to go early.  This time, we didn't split one breakfast. I knew we'd want more fuel on our second day.

I don't remember what they called this, but it was some kind of Benedict with pulled pork, and cheesy grits on the side. You might be able to tell that I couldn't wait to take a picture before taking a bite.  My mouth is watering now just typing about it.

I love my skis, but I don't have the means to travel with them, and I wasn't sure when we left Virginia whether I'd be able to ski at all, given the conditions, so we had to hit the rental shop first.  I felt bad that we lost twenty minutes of skiing that way, but I'm a little bit mental about being one of the first people on the lift, and one of the last people off the mountain.  If I'm going to pay for that lift ticket, I want to get every possible second of use wrung out of it.

The Girl on Pine Marten chair.  Trust me, she's in there.

The Girl is not as obsessive as I am about skiing.  She does weird things like getting "cold" and "tired" and "hungry."  To be fair, while I can ski circles around her, I have to train for weeks to put in the distance she considers a "short run."  We each have our strengths.  Mine, apparently, is heavily reliant on gravity.

Looking at the Sisters from just below the base of Summit Chair.

By 2:00 or 2:30, the snow was getting sticky with afternoon sun.  It was difficult for her to ski slowly, and it was probably dangerous for me to ski fast (if your skis hit a sticky spot, they'll slow down.  You won't.  Newtonian physics for the win!).  It was tiring for both of us, so we split up.  She took a long, gentle slope back to the rental center, and I squeezed in five or six more runs.  Just because I shouldn't have gone fast doesn't mean I stopped.  I was careful, yes, but I was also greedy.

The Girl heads toward Olympian.  I'll catch up.

I had a few friends in town who knew I'd be visiting, but many of them were out of town that week, and we really didn't have enough time to see everyone I missed.  Still, I wanted to be sure to visit Nahid, who had come to see us two years ago.  She promised us a Persian meal, and I knew hers would be far more authentic than my best efforts.  Turns out our visit fell during observance of the Persian new year, and we got to see her beautiful table display.  The items all start with an "s" sound in her native tongue.

Happy Persian New Year!

My job was to get the grill going. I was nearly successful.  We managed, eventually, using a combination of briquettes, newsprint, Ponderosa pine cones, and lighter fluid. She set out skewers of tomatoes, chicken drumsticks marinated in beer and garlic, and began forming skewers of seasoned ground beef.  I was thrilled, and we hadn't even eaten anything yet.

Beef: it's what's for dinner.  Also, chicken, tomatoes, eggplant, rice, salad, flatbread, beer, and dessert.

She was leaving town in a couple days, so she demanded that we leave no leftovers.  We did our level best, but we're only three people, and two of us (the two that aren't me) are really small.  There was a LOT of food.  It was amazing.  Plus, I think each of us held back a little because The Girl and I had stopped at La Magie after skiing to pick up three little desserts (which we trisected, so everyone got to try everything), and nobody wanted to miss out on that.

My first of several plates.

The Honeymooners, day one

Besides my ongoing effort to get a book published, there's another reason I've been sloppy about posting since my hike: I was planning a wedding.  Admittedly, I didn't do all of the work, but being the Unemployed One means I had more time to do a lot of it.  Luckily, neither of us plan on getting married again, so I'll probably never have to plan another wedding, but from what I heard, consensus was that we nailed it.

Then we went to Bend for a few days.

I missed Bend, and I'm not sure I fully appreciated how much I'd missed it until I got to go back.  Before the trip, I still felt conflicted about whether I'd even enjoy it.  It felt like telling a junkie, "here, just have a little crack... but no more, ever."  I was wrong.  It was great to be back in my city.

A fox napped peacefully in the yard of our rental. 

We stayed at a place The Girl found through Air BnB.  We had a little trouble finding it in the dark, jetlagged and exhausted the day after our wedding reception, but it was a great place.  We wouldn't have been able to cook much there, but that was never the plan.  By the end of the week, we actually felt bad that we hadn't gotten to spend more time enjoying the rental itself, but we couldn't stomach going to Bend just to sit inside.

My "black and white" at La Magie

Around the same time we decided to go to Bend, I decided that I wanted to visit one of my favorite places in town: La Magie bakery.  I'd consumed a lot of pastry and exotic coffee beverages there while writing on various projects, and on the day when Dad helped me leave town with all my worldly possessions, we carried a large bag of pastires and bread with us from the same place.  They had changed a lot, and all for the good.  I miss the comfy lounge upstairs, but they've expanded into the building next door, and now offer a full menu for breakfast and lunch.  The Girl and I split a chocolate croissant and an omelet (with fried potatoes--holey moley, those fried potatoes!!), and neither of us were hungry again until well after four that afternoon.  It's a shame, too, because there were lunch places I wanted to visit, too, and our breakfasts each day were so substantial that we never had a mid-day meal.

This gentleman and his ducks are frequently redecorated.  This time, they were ready for St. Patrick's Day.

We gave ourselves a quick tour of downtown, then drove to Pilot Butte.  It's a tiny state park that rises up from the middle of town, and is visible from almost everywhere in the town.  When I lived there, I used it as a landmark to tell other people and my visitors how to navigate.

Mt. Bachelor, seen from Pilot Butte

The view from the top is just as useful for navigation.  You can see the whole town laid out below.  My old office is still visible to the south.  On the Fourth of July, we'd gather in the office parking lot to watch the annual fireworks show launched from the top of the butte.  You could usually see the lights of firetrucks parked along the butte's spiraling road, because every couple of years the fireworks ignite the dry vegetation and the butte catches fire.  For weeks after such an event, you can see large charred areas when you hike there.

It's great to be back!

At the summit, in the center of a stone plaza, is a mountain identifier set in a compass face.  Directions and distances to many of the visible surrounding landmarks tell visitors what the various bumps and ridges are along the horizon.

Pilot Butte's mountain identifier

The Girl told me that she'd never hiked Pilot Butte in all her visits to Bend.  On our way down from the summit, we took the trail that circles the base of the butte, which I'd never done, so the first thing we did in Bend turned out to be new for both of us.  We were off to a great start!

sagebrush

We had both always enjoyed the River Walk trail, near the Old Mill District, so we headed there next.  She had walked it with me several times, and I used to run there following work, standing in the frigid Deschutes afterward to ice my shins.

This team of logging horses is made of shovel heads, trowels, gears, and other assorted bits of metal.  They are fantastic.

It was one of the places I recommended to all of my visitors, because it's an easy walk, and feels surprisingly wild considering it's in the middle of town.  Plus, there's lots of informative signs to tell you about the diversity of life along the river, and throughout Oregon.

Oregon Grape Holly, the state wildflower.

Greenleaf Manzanita

Ponderosa pines. The bark smells like vanilla.  I learned that as a kid visiting Arizona, and got to teach that little tidbit to several Oregon locals when I lived there.

Juniper berries

Good advice for everyone.

Rain threatened all afternoon, but we only got a brief sprinkle.

We still weren't hungry, but we had a couple hours to kill before dinner with my dad's cousin and his wife (I was a frequent guest of theirs for Superbowl parties and dinners when I lived in town, and helped put a roof on their greenhouse).  We used that time to visit another favorite spot: Meadow Camp.  It's a little upstream from the river walk.  Between the two spots is some good crack climbing.  We went the other direction, upstream, to Lava Island Falls.

The Deschutes River, somewhere west of Meadow Camp.

I don't know that I stopped grinning all day.  Come to think of it, I don't know that I stopped grinning for the entire three days we were in Bend.  I felt like I'd come home.  Dinner that night was at McMenamin's, a St. Pat's tradition for my cousin's family.  The Girl and I had a reuben and Irish stew, and we were serenaded by a pair of musicians working the tables.  Outside, we found two more performance venues, all on the same property, and both packed with green-clad people of all ages, happy just to be in Bend.  Who could blame them?

These gentlemen played traditional Irish music at the tables all night.  They played two Irish tunes for the newlyweds, at my cousin;s request.

Puttering along the Potomac

I took a lot of early-morning walks along the Potomac through the winter and early spring, and I was surprised by how much cool stuff I saw by revisiting the same stretch of very urban river nearly every day.  For instance, for six or eight weeks, I could reliably see bald eagles almost every single day I visited.  One day, I went back in the afternoon and saw two adults harassing what seemed to be a juvenile bald eagle until it dropped whatever treat it was carrying.  It was an impressive aerial performance, and once the prize was released, one of the adults deftly snatched it from the air and departed. Naturally, I didn't have a camera that day.  But sightings like that encouraged me to take the camera often, in hopes of seeing something else interesting.

The Potomac briefly froze all the way across.  I was pretty sure I could walk it, but had the good sense not to try.  A few days later, the thinner ice made strange piles that looked like volcanoes.

I spent a few minutes watching this hawk chase a squirrel through a tree.  The squirrel is what originally caught my attention; I heard it squawking at something, then noticed the hawk, which would move close enough to scare the squirrel to a different part of the tree, wait a moment, then move again, trying to herd the little rodent to a place she could attack.

If you look very closely, you can see three bald eagles in this picture.

I was amazed how patient this great blue heron was with my photography. This is not the only shot I took, but it's the best of the set.

Sky Meadows

The Girl wanted to take advantage of a rare free weekend by going for a hike somewhere.  I never turn down a hike, so I wasn't particular about where we went.  She picked a park in Virginia, and I kept thinking it sounded familiar.  I was sure I'd been there; then I looked at my big wall map of the Appalachian Trail and found it between Shenandoah and Harpers Ferry.  Sky Meadows State Park.

We arrived early, took a look in the gift shop and visitors center (both new to me, since they weren't right on the trail), and hiked a short loop around the flatter section of the park.

Ice is fascinating.

 After lunch in the parking lot, we set out up a long hill through what looked like a pasture.  Every so often, we'd remember to turn around and soak in the view of the valley below, and the rapidly shrinking farmhouse next to the visitors center.  Near the top of the climb, things started to look familiar. I hadn't been on that section of trail, but something about the shape of the land, and the types of plants and trees looked right (even though the last time I'd seen them, they'd had leaves, and there wasn't any snow).

Looking back down at the park buildings.

 Then we turned a corner, and I saw my old friend.  We reacquainted ourselves, as one does, and The Girl and I got to hike along the AT again for maybe a mile or so before turning to a side trail back towards the parking lot.  I was a little turned around because we were hiking south, instead of north, so things that I remembered were visited in the opposite order, but it was still good to be back.

This was our best attempt at kicking snow into the sunlight. It never looked as cool on the camera as it did in person.

Originally, our plan for the day had been to finish with dinner at a place far from where we lived, but we weren't hungry until we got back home, so we just went somewhere we'd never been: Bilbo Baggins's Green Dragon Inn.  As you might guess, there was a lot of hobbit-related art, and the occasional tapestry.  The food was excellent.

Fret not... or do.

We've developed an understanding with our glass-blowing friend. She lets us help make cool stuff, and I bring cookies. In November, when we made Christmas ornaments, I even brought some pasta salad for dinner.  Hopefully, she'll never realize that I'm perfectly happy with this arrangement, without any other perks, because she also gives us one of the pieces we make each time we help her, and we're slowly filling a shelf with her outstanding work.  I like that collection.

"Fret" is the colored bits of glass.  Here, she's laid stripes of two different colors on the marver (big steel table). By rolling the gather (glob of clear glass) over this fret, she can get two different regions of color on the final piece.

Fret has already been melted into this piece in the glory hole (go ahead and laugh. We always do), but you can still see two distinct regions of color.

For a single color, she usually collects the fret directly from these bowls.

This shot is harder for me to get, because I took it when I was supposed to be focused on my job of holding the ornament steady while she applies a loop of clear glass to the top for hanging.  This loop also seals the hole left when we remove the piece from the blowpipe.

This is my view for a lot of the forming.  I sit on a little box and provide hot air. It's a little like a management position that way.

Adding another hanging loop. This ornament was treated with some special powder she had to get that cracked-snow look.

You can see dimples on the sides of this piece. She squeezed it from the end with long tweezers (on the bench beside her). That was the first step...

The second was stretching the material, then rotating the pipe while holding the end of the stretch in line with the pipe to get a long, twisty piece.  It was supposed to be practice for a candy cane shape, but things went downhill from here. Still good practice!

I Spy: Old Rag Edition

Our Shenandoah volunteer group does a couple training weekends each year, and we spend lots of time on the mountain talking to visitors, teaching Leave No Trace ethics, and (very occasionally) assisting in rescues, but we also have one designated Fun Weekend a year.  This is an official thing, in addition to the two or three times smaller subsets of the group get together for cabin trips, snowshoeing, game nights, and the completely unrelated but jaw-dropping annual cookie swap.  In the past, I've never been able to attend the Fun Weekend, due to various schedule conflicts, and missed out on things like rappelling and the zip line, but last November we had a scavenger hunt.

I rock scavenger hunts.

My teammate and I not only found the most items on the list, but we did well enough in the Skills portion to firmly cement a first-place finish.  Some of our list items are shown below.

A bearbag, incorrectly hung.

"We were told to dress up." "I dressed up as Batman."

A stick insect. Remarkable camouflage!

Christmas fern (see how the individual leaflets look like stockings?)

A dog. (They are not allowed on Old Rag, but you're guaranteed to see them, because people ignore that rule. We saw at least four dogs that day, but only one in a pack)

We were told to find a phone booth.  There is no phone booth, so my teammate and I improvised.

A bear.

"Can you make a bear face while wearing the bear hat? We'll get extra points for that!" Not true, but worth it to get this picture.

Cacapon

We have friends who like to do "cabin weekends," when we'll rent a place somewhere, play games at night, and go hiking during the day.  Their ideas of hiking are often wildly different from mine, but we handle that by giving me a heavy pack and making sure I stay behind the group.  At night, of course, we feast.  This time, we also found a gorgeously-made jigsaw puzzle by Liberty Puzzles, laser-cut from 1/4" maple plywood.  I liked it so much, I bought one for Dad for Christmas.

On Saturday morning, we hiked a loop at Cacaopon State Park in West Virginia.  Some of the leaves had fallen, but there was still some good fall color, and the weather was pretty mild.

The loop took us along a ridge, then dropped back down through the forest to where we had parked.  The ridge meant we had lots of good opportunities for Summit Cookies.

The nearby hot springs have quite a history, but none of us felt like paying the admission fee to see the underground rooms hosting the springs.

There were some unique trophies in the cabin.

On Sunday, we took a little walk along the canal towpath. If we followed it far enough east, it would eventually take us back to DC.  Instead, we wandered west, mainly to check out this tunnel.  I love tunnels. Without a headlamp, this one quickly became creepy. The light you see here is all sunlight, reflected up at the ceiling from the water below.

I made a friend!