Beach house- Recap

For our last weekend in cali, my dad rented a beach house in Newport for a few days. It was awesome to wake up and walk right out onto the beach. We played, ate yummy food, bike rides, celebrated dad's birthday at The Melting Pot, played some more, watched several gorgeous sunsets, and built numerous amounts of sand castles.

"Look at me, mom. Im crawling too." I guess its mutual wanting to be like brother.
We spent a lot of time outside. Everyone loved papa's bike rides. The wedge, Corona Del Mar. I could live there...
Gorgeous sunsets.

I love my little family.
Cali did not disappoint. The drive home was not nearly as fun. Or eventful for that matter. The boys and I were over driving by about hour 10. And as soon as we crossed into Oregon, the clouds rolled in and the mist started. Welcome home.

Cabin

Can can you not love life waking up to this??

Moving on. So the next day we headed up to a cabin with my mom in Arrowhead. Its so nice to just get away and be together as a family. We had a blast! We stayed up late playing games, laughing, poking fun at each other and eating. I really love my family.

Ashlyn and Rhys play so well together, except when they don't. HA!

We got up and went to play in the snow. There really is not alot up there, so we had to drive 45 minutes further up the mountain to a hill that is shaded most of the day to find enough snow to take a sled ride on. This picture makes me think of march of the penguins...

Rhys loved to "squuuiiiiisssshhhh" the snow balls. The sledding was kind of a bust. We didn't actually have sleds. And the amount of snow was minimal. And, well, my kids did not love it. Ashlyns monkey feet.

Court, Mom and Wes. After our snowman, we walked across the street to this diner for lunch. It was really good! Or we were all really hungry from our snow day.

Recap- San Juan Islands and Wedding

Oh, to be done with recapping and on to whats actually happening...

At the beginning of October, I went up to the San Juan Islands (just north of Seattle) with my dad for a quick trip. Some times we plan out every detail from where we are are going to stay to the activities booked well in advance. This was not one of those times. In all my traveling I have learned a few things: Some places its nice to get there and find the area that you want to stay in before booking a hotel. Others, you need a reservation well in advance because there is a U2 concert in town that night and all the hotels in a 30 mile radius of Dublin are booked, leaving you stranded until 11:30pm driving around to end up in a small room above a very busy pub....Anyways.

So for this trip, I was thinking that since its the end of tourist season up there, we would have no trouble finding somewhere to stay when we got there. This probably would have been true if we had tried to find something before all the offices closed at 5. And that would have been done had we not been 5 minutes too late for the ferry, which left us waiting for an hour and a half waiting for the next one. I know what your thinking. Isn't that an hour and a half that you could have found something..... but no. Dont really have any exceses there. The good news in misisng that ferry is that our sunset ferry ride was gorgeous!!

Anacortes to Friday Harbor

And just like the lodging, I thought we could get there and book a boat tour to go see the orca's, since that was my main reason for going up there. Wrong. Because it is the end of the season, there was only 1 boat even going and by the time we called they only had 3 spots left. We needed 4. Curses. In my effort to find a boat, I did get ahold of a wonderful lady who gave me the insider scoop that the Orca's were headed back to the islands from a 3 day hiatus and she called me about an hour before they were supposed to be passing along the coast. So, after spending all morning waiting to see these whales, thinking I would have to come again next year if this was a failure, they came! Success!

After a day in the Islands, we headed down to Seattle for my second cousins wedding. Justin flew in that night. It was a beautiful small ceremony and reception at the Salish Lodge in Snoqualamie. And as always, it was great to see our family again.