Gold Creek hike

Rebecca, Ruby, Lance and I went hiking near Snoqualmie Pass this Saturday. We went to Gold Creek trail, off of exit 54 on I-90. It was a perfect day for a hike, really sunny and not terribly hot. The trail follows along Gold Creek the whole way. At 4 miles, it crosses over the creek and that is where we stopped for lunch and turned around.

Here is the very beginning of the trail, you can see Alaska mountain in the background with snow still on it.



The trail is in a valley, and there were some nice waterfalls on the cliffs above. Here are the two most impressive ones, in the order in which we came upon them.




We stopped when the trail crossed the creek and had lunch. And took several pictures. Here is Rebecca sitting on a rock in the middle of the river looking very zen like.



Here is Rebecca and Ruby in a few shots....




Here is Ruby in stick fetching action, she really loves all hikes that are along rivers.



Here is Lance waiting for me to accidentally drop my sandwich.



Here is Lance and Ruby training to steal my sandwich.



This view is looking up the creek from our lunch spot



And this last picture taken at the lunch spot is an artsy one looking down through the water at the rocks.



The wild flowers were coming out along the whole trail.

Poker for birthdays

It was Rebecca's birthday on July 4th. To celebrate, she hosted a poker party at my home. It was a great success, with lots of people showing up and lots of cheering and cries of anguish depending on which side of the winning hand you were on. We had two tables going. There was an interesting contrast between the two tables, at one table the pots tended to have huge piles of the larger denomination chips (we decided that we would consider them doubloons because we weren't playing for real money), while at the other table it was small piles of the small chips.

This first picture is an arty shot....




This is Leo and his daughter...




Here is Rebecca's friends from work, Rosa and Tiffany (there were lots more people than are showing up in the picture, but many of the photos are pretty blurry because of the low light conditions).




Here is Jens doing his best evil laughter as he wins a big pot...

Bike trip to Lopez

Rebecca and I took a 3 day bike camping trip to Lopez island. We stayed at a private campsite that had a combination of cottages and tent sites. The tent sites were very nice, super flat, with a hammock and two Adirondack chairs. Here is a picture of Rebecca sitting at the campsite.


Here is Rebecca and her new bike. It is a Redline cyclocross bike, and she really likes it. We put a lot of miles in (I really came to appreciate the luxury of a car after having to hop on the bike to do every simple errand), and she felt comfortable for the whole weekend.





Here is an artsy picture of boats in the harbor across from the Galley restaurant where we had breakfast every morning. It is a great restaurant, I highly recommend their eggs. They must have been fresh eggs from a local farmer because they were super light and fluffy.


Here are more boats.


Luckily the camp was pretty close to the ferry terminal, so we didn't have to ride too far with all the camping gear. Rebecca rode with panniers on her back rack, and I carried my stuff on a BOB trailer (I forgot take a picture of our bikes fully loaded). I borrowed the trailer from a friend (thanks Chris!) and it worked out great. The campsite was also close to Lopez village, which is where most of the stores are. And this church...




There was a Farmers Market in the village on Saturday morning and Rebecca was able to buy all the ingredients to a great dinner that evening. I which I would have taken a picture of the community building at the campsite where they had very nice bathrooms with showers. The showers were amazing, they had huge open air skylights above them (it would have been cold in the winter, and two shower heads so you were never cold on one side of your body. And there were several picnic tables under the roof, and a nice fireplace. The building was really nice on the first evening where there was a rain shower.


Eventually we had to come back to Seattle, and here is a picture of the ferry arriving to take us home.


And here is Rebecca and I waiting for the ferry to arrive. It was a very relaxing anf fun trip. It is tough to come back to busy Seattle. It would be great to move to Lopez and enjoy the simple, slow life.