A pampered day at Salish Lodge

We spend the night at Salish Lodge, a swanky resort nestled atop the picturesque Snoqualmie Falls. We’d been there this time last year for tea and cakes with Mum and Dad – now we had a gift voucher from Karen’s friends to spend (thanks, girls!).

Our room had a proper wood-burning fire (great at the end of a chilly day!), a luxurious bubbly bath and a view over the cool old hydroelectric plant (109 years old and still generating).

Apparently you can take a tour of the underground power plant – we’re signing up for that as soon as possible.

Our anniversary! Snowshoeing fun

Wow – that year rolled around quickly! It was Karen’s birthday this week and our anniversary any day now, so we combined the two in a weekend expedition around Snoqualmie.

It was snowing heavily all weekend, but just incredibly beautiful up on the West Summit of Snoqualmie Pass. We snowshoed up the Commonwealth Creek trail – not too tough and just great fun.

The famous Snoqualmie snow camels!

Here’s a mysterious and ancient figure carved from prehistoric ice.

You might have to wait a while before the loos are open again…

Wobbles and goodbyes

A couple of random pictures here. First event was a booze up at the Arctic Hotel downturn (Trika and Karen’s new favourite hang out). Much hilarity from use of the iPhone application called Wobble.

Kurt and Trika like to Wobble! And so does Ginger.

Then just a round-up from our dinner celebration/commiseration on Wednesday to mark Aurelia’s return to civilisation France. More family-related recipe excellence – thanks to mum for her cheesy potato dish (the French actually called it ‘pommes Dauphinoise’ which is quite a compliment) and also the super-easy chocolate mousse – delicious!

From the left: Jonathan, Bettina, Bart, me, Ayumi and Aurelia.

Pancake Day: American style. And late.

Kurt and Ginger came up for the weekend last week, so we decided to throw a pancake brunch for the Whitman alumni – Mike (plus wife Michelle and kids Jack and Zora) and Ky (plus Abbey and Bryn).

Thanks to Dad for the pancake recipe – we added blueberries and bananas instead of apples but they were still delicious!

Here’s Ky, Abbey and Bryn, and a few leftover pancakes in the foreground. Don’t worry, I ate them later.

Burn baby burn!

Domestic interlude. We finally got round to having the old gas fire taken out of the fireplace, and getting it reverted to wood. Randy the chimney guy (there’s a joke in there somewhere) took his life in has hands scaling our extremely steep roof to fit a new damper and cap. He’s a grizzled chimney old-timer – but his hands were still shaking when he eventually made it down. Scary stuff.

Here’s Karen setting our very first fire…

And here it is merrily blazing away. We love it! A lot!

The great ascent of Mount Si

Enough lounging around the house and buying knick-knacks – time for some exercise! On Sunday we drove out to Mount Si, a decent enough size hill of about 4000 feet.

Yum! An apple about two miles – just halfway up this tough trail.

A break in the trees – nearly there!

On top of the world – and rather bracing when exposed to the wind and snow that just started to fall as we reached the peak.

Dramatic, eh? Great pic from the wife!

And a well deserved mini-Mount Si of grease on the way home. This is at Twede’s diner in North Bend. It’s the same diner from Twin Peaks – cherry pie and a damn fine of coffee. Still unspoiled, though!

Chilly Hilly

This is an annual bike ride of about 33 miles through the hills of Bainbridge Island, a 30 minute ferry ride from downtown. It’s meant to mark the start of cycling season, and as Karen was off gallivanting in San Francisco with her girlfriends, I decided to try it.

Here’s the crowd waiting for the first ferry out – at about 7.30am.

Yes, this guy was intending to cycle 33 miles and ascend over 2500ft on a UNICYCLE.

Here I’m about two thirds of the way round, having just eaten a tasty chocolate brownie and some lemon cakes – kids set up stalls all the way round the route – sweet!