Saturday, June 12, 2010

A weekend to ourselves!

So my parents have the girls for the weekend - which I think is a win-win. Or more like a win-win-win-win situation. My parents are happy to be spending time with the girls that we so rudely moved away from them, the girls think it's super special to be spending the night without us and were thrilled to make it to a friend's b-day party and cousin's baptism that they would've missed, Patti and Jim got to babysit them which they love, and we get some time alone. I don't know when the last time was that they spent the night elsewhere without us. We totally slept in this morning! It was GREAT! The house is oddly quiet, but I got some painting done in peace earlier and then we went exploring our new surroundings. We drove up this one unpaved road, got to the top and saw this looking one direction:And this, when we turned around to look the opposite way:WOW! WOW! WOW (Let's play name those mountains ... we're not sure about one of them. Anybody know what it is?)! Then the bumpy road threw out our power steering but that's another story (fortunately it recovered after a bit of sweat and worry). Then we drove a ways up the Gorge, up to Rowena Crest viewpoint, and decided to take a 3 mile hike through Tom McCall preserve. I'm not sure hiking around in loosely rocky, steep pathways is part of the pregnant exercise routine but I survived. And these were some of our views:




We kept startling wild life, like lots of birds, crickets, toads, snakes (just as startling to us), chipmunks, probably some mice, and deer, like this one:
Our hike brought us right up to the edge of this crazy plateau cliff overlooking the entire world, although in the picture, our heads our too big for you to see much of anything:
Oddly enough, the hike wasn't supposed to bring us there. It was supposed to take us on some loop ... which we never found. We tried after we were headed back (you couldn't go any farther off the cliff), but ended up discovering we had taken some deer path that kind of disappeared into thin air. Crazy deer. So we broke the law and created our own shortcut back to the trail in order to avoid backtracking because it was hot and we were sweaty and I was out-of-breath. And now I can't move. I might have overdone it a bit. Oh well, since the girls weren't here to see, I had a big bowl of ice cream for dinner to help my sore muscles feel better. Tee hee. And we get to sleep in again tomorrow! Thanks mom!

2 comments:

Anna-Kare said...

Fred's old stomping grounds! He could tell you the name of all the mountains and the views feel so familiar. We lived in Hood River for the first 6 months we were married. It is gorgeous up there. Glad you get to enjoy it for a time.

Raina said...

This looks SO fun! peaceful.. and sunny. Wow! What a combo. I'm so glad you had some time alone, and hopefully you'll get more of it before this little guy comes to join the fun. :D