Freedom from Fear

It's one of the four freedoms expressed by President Roosevelt and while there have been numerous writings on it - whole books in fact, I have never really thought about it.  But for some reason that's what I was thinking as Russ and I went hiking on our little anniversary trip this weekend. 

Freedom from Fear.  This is it.

(See those caves up there, that's where we went)

 

I don't know what it was, but I was thinking how nice it was that we could just go out in nature and find a trail and feel perfectly safe hiking through the wilderness, passing people as we went and just being able to enjoy the beauty of it all.  That sounds simple, but this is not so in many of the countries I have been in.  And maybe it's because I was wearing my HELP International shirt (which someone actually stopped me to ask about, by the way), but I kept thinking about some of the horrible incidents that have happen on beautiful paths just like this one in places that aren't as safe as the US and how the last time I hiked like this is El Salvador, we had to hire an armed guard to go with us. How blessed we are and we take it for granted! 

 

The view, the clean air, getting exercise, being together - it was all wonderful.  What a great thing to be able enjoy this God's creations and to feel so blessed to live in this beautiful, safe country.

It was such a great way to spend time together!  Oh, and I love this man.  Happy 13th, babe!

Skamania Day 5 - The last FULL day

I know, it's getting old, this whole Skamania thing, but I can't start posting about our vacation day by day and then not finish.  But I did really struggle with the title, because my brother informed me that everytime he saw one of these postings, he read it as Ska (as in the type of music) -mania (as in some sort of craziness) and originally he's thinking "wow, I didn't know they were into that".  So now everytime I think of Skamania, that's what I think too.  Oh well.  Onto our day...

We started the morning by playing around the outside of the hotel. It was an absolutely gorgeous day and from the back of our hotel, there was an awesome view of the gorge.

playing "rock band" in the ampitheatre behind the hotel (there was a beautiful wedding there the night before)

Then it was off to hike one of the trails that head out from the lodge.  We chose the "Creek Loop Trail", because it had lots of bridges, we got to pass a couple cool little lagoons, and it weaved in and out of the gorgeous golf course.

 And all along the way we got to eat lots and lots of berries!

 The boys' other favorite part was hunting for golf balls...

Then we headed up the gorge and found a yummy place to eat lunch.  Looks cheesy, but they had THE best cinnamon roll french toast EVER.

We spent the afternoon at the Columbia River Gorge Discovery Center. We learned all about Lewis and Clark; how the gorge was formed; how the early settlers made it through and lots of other interesting things.  It was really quite fun.  They had a whole room just for kids to play - dig for fossils, dress up, make crafts.  It was great!

Hooray for our fun day!  Now back to the hotel for some swimming!  (Of course.)

Skamania Day 3 & 4 - A weekend visit from our Seattle freinds!

Since I am so far behind on blogging, I am still talking about our Oregon/Washington trip, in case you're confused.  By Saturday, which was 5 days into our trip, we were in desparate need of some clean laundry, and since I was not going to pay $3.50 per shirt and $2.00 for each pair of socks to be washed at the hotel, I headed over to the local laundromat while Russ took the boys swimming.  At first I thought, "Oh, this will be kind of nice.  I will put the laundry in and then just sit and relax, read my book, etc."  Little did I know that would be cleaning out gross washing machines, because I put my money in it and then looked inside.  And that I would be going back and forth to the nearby grocery store because I ran out of change when the machine stole my money (only it didn't really steal my money, I am just commercial laundromat dryer inept).  Or that I would have to go back to the store because there was NO bathroom at the tiny little laundromat. Ugh.  So I had about 15 minutes of down time, in which I cleaned out my purse.  Yippee (w/ sarcasm).

But onto the more exciting part.  Some friends of ours drove about 4 hours down from Seattle just to see us!  They arrived right around lunch time, so we headed over to this place called The Crazy Pepper.  We had seen it the night before and decided we should eat there because we really liked the name.  And it actually turned out to be quite good.  Best part: the umbrellas that came in the drinks (not sure how Mexican that is, but whatever.)

After that, the big boys took the little boys while my friend, Jen, and I did a little shopping around Hood River.  It's your typical little tourist town, lots of boutiques and random shops.  It was fun.  I didn't spend that much money, because everything was either too expensive or too weird.  I think if I didn't live in Utah, I could pull it off, but . . . you know.  Anyway, so that night Jen and I stayed with the boys while Russ and Rahul went out and had some man time.  It's good for them to get away too. :)

Jen and Rahul crashed in our room with us, so the boys had a little floor slumber party, complete with glow sticks.  They were so cute once they were asleep, I couldn't resist.

The next day we hiked Beacon Rock.  It's famous apparently, and so of course, we had to see it.  I was never in a place to actually get a picture of it from any decent distance, so here's a picture I stole from the internet:

And here's what the hike looked like:

But the kids were serious troopers and did awesome!

And the view from the top wasn't too bad either.

And we all made it back to the bottom...

 

Since we had had a super late breakfast, we skipped lunch and headed back to the hotel for a bike ride.  The hotel has free adult bikes, so we had brought Corbin's bike and the bike trailer (for Russ' workout).  It was gorgeous!  That is until we had to ride back UP to the hotel.  It was fun anyway. 

 

We rode into town and got ice cream and homemade donuts.  Unfortunately the same guy was working as when we had been there the night before.  hehe.  Yeah, we're addicts, but it's vacation, right?

(Don't worry, you are now half way done with hearing about this vacation.)

Skamamish Day 1

Since I've jumped around a little bit, and to clarify for my regular readers and avid followers, this is the continuation of our trip to Oregon/Washington and follows the first post (even though this says "day 1").

So after we left Ontario area, we headed up and across the state of Oregon into the Columbia River Gorge.  I was surprised that besides a brief stint of trees, most of the drive was high desert type terrain.  We kept waiting for the beautiful, lush, green forests we had seen in pictures and always pictured Oregon to be like.  It wasn't until part way into the Gorge that it was what I had imagined it to be like (Russ was thinking more Flaming Gorge, with huge steep cliffs shooting up), but it was absolutely gorgeous!  And the drive along the river was incredible!  Our hotel was actually on the Washington side near a little town called Stevenson and it was the perfect setting.  The hotel was called Skamania Lodge, but for some reason Russ could never remember the name - Skamamish? Skamountain?  Whatever.  It was super nice and thanks to my dad, we got an awesome deal, no way we could have stayed there without it.  So we are extremely grateful.

Onto our first day . . . (well our real first day we checked in, went to the pool for a bit and then went to bed, so that doesn't really count).  We started out with the intent to drive about 40 min away to check out a view of Mt St Helens, but about 15 or 20 miles out we realized we were almost out of gas and there would be nothing when we got out there, and then how would we get back?  So we decided to pull off and attempt one of the many hikes we had passed on our twisty road through the trees.  Falls Creek Trail turned out to be a perfect hike . . .

Cool trees

Cool rocks to climb on (and in)

Cool bridges

And at the end, an AWESOME waterfall!

(Can you see them all the way down there!?)

We had our picnic by the falls before we hiked back down.

It was totally cool.  Gorgeous falls and perfect weather, what more could you ask for?   Super fun hike and the boys did great!   Loved it!

After the hike (well, after Russ hiked halfway back up to get his glasses), we went back to the hotel to go swimming.  We did this pretty much everyday, but I promise you won't have to see swimming pictures in every post.  Just a few. :)

That night after dinner (and an interesting experience involving underwear), we went out to watch the kite boarders on the river.  Apparently the Gorge is the kite-boarding capital of the world.  It looked really fun, but was maybe even more fun to watch.  We had the perfect spot on the dock, because we could see the whole river, but we were behind a little bend just out of the wind.  We had fun seeing them jump, watching them crash, and hoping they didn't run over each other too much.  It was a really good time!

UP NEXT:  Lots of fish, another waterfall, and a new car . . . are you intrigued yet?