Adventures in … Life

This last weekend Deborah, Proctor, Bebeth, Lucy, and I all went up to Starlight to “open up”. “Open up” refers to the process of unpacking the “Green House” from it’s winter storage and preparing it for all the spring and summer fun. This involves dusting, vacuuming, mopping, cleaning out the cupboards, fishing (any trip to starlight usually involves fishing), and unpacking all the seat cushions and pillows from their plastic cocoons. It’s definitely hard work.

But in order to do all that hard work you gotta eat well. How about some home made biscuits, strawberries, honey, jam, maple butter, and bass from the lake (which I caught) for breakfast? Sign me up!

Last weekend I was still in Seattle while Bebeth was already in New York. I decided I’d make a last minute trip over to Eastern Washington to fish since I’d be out on the East Coast most of the summer. My target was Lake Lenice, a 94 acre lake just south of Vantage. It was planted with Rainbow, Brown, and Tiger trout. I got up Saturday morning at around 5:30am and got to the lake around 7:30am. 20 minutes later I was kicking my way out into the lake. There were so many different birds around, red wing black birds, yellow headed black birds, coots, magpies, and swallows … and of course trout! It was a great day of fishing and catching. I “brought to hand” around 10 -15 trout and missed maybe twice that many.

That day I found out that I had a major leak in my waders, so the next morning instead of donning wet clothes, I drove over to Rocky Ford, which is a spring creek near Ephrata and spent a couple of hours chasing large spring creek trout from shore. Picked another 4 fish from there.

Anyway was a great weekend of fishing!

Mark and I are spending the month of May living with my parents in New York City and I chose my arrival date so that I could ride in the five borough bike ride. Its a 42 mile ride put on by Bike New York that goes through each of the five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island). They cap the participation at 30,000 which isn’t a very high percentage of the population, but it still quite a lot of people. There aren’t many events in NYC that give quite as good a sense of community. The last time I did this was in 2001 and its gotten quite organized and very popular (spaces filled up fast). My dad and I enjoyed the beautiful weather and the mostly flat terrain. There were lots of rest areas with food and music, plenty of new sights to see, and even a ferry ride at the end!

Unfortunately I didn’t have a good camera with me (our small one was in a lake with Mark in Eastern Washington), but I took a few with my cell phone.

The first one is of the longest bike I’ve ever seen. Its a little hard to tell, but the yellow baby carrier at the back (sans baby) is at the end of 4 attached bikes. The front is the father’s full-sized bike and behind him are each of his three daughters’ bikes. Its not exactly a tandem, but they’re attached with some bar (I’m sure all you parents know exactly what it is). It seemed a little unwieldy in length, but it was pretty cool.
This shot is of one of the rest areas with lots of people!

Today was sunny and beautiful….just the right temperature for a bike ride (well, when isn’t it the right time for a bike ride?!) Mark, Jessica and I headed out to Whidbey Island for a day of fishing (Mark) and riding (Jessica and Bebeth). Jessica and I plotted our route on the ferry with food stops guiding our way. Neither of us had ever ridden on Whidbey Island, so it was a bit of the blind leading the blind….but we had a great day. We travelled from Freeland north along the west coast to Greenbank, back down the East side to Freeland where we had lunch at Gerrys (yummy food). Then we headed up the other side of Honeymoon bay and over to Langley for some ice cream. It was only 30 miles in the end. But early in the season and with lots of hills, it still managed to kick our butts.

Our route:

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For the last week, everyone in Seattle has been talking about, “that day” … aka a day full of glorious sunshine. Supposedly up in the high sixties. Some of our friends went paddling, some went cycling … we went geocaching up in Deception Pass Park.

Don’t know what geocaching is? It’s basically a high tech treasure hunt utilizing a GPS. People hide a little “cache” around the world and then publish the GPS coordinates of the cache on a web site. We will often pick a hike, and then look up and see if there are any cache’s in the area. You then go and look for the cache with your gps. Often it’s a rubbermaid container filled with various items (it can be anything from gift certificates to dollar store items.)

Here’s a picture of our GPS.

Here we are logging our name in the “guest book” of the cache. You can see other people leave comments or just their name or even stamps.
Here’s a picture of a small little rubber army guy that was in this cache.

Here’s a funny Monsters Inc. character that was in this cache. Plus a picture of the lid of the cache.

Lastly the tulips are (if they haven’t already) about to pop. On our way out from deception pass park we passed through the tulip fields.

… and of course with sunshine and flowers you get traffic …

Ok, so Mark and I don’t have a little girl, but today it felt like we did. We’re down in Santa Cruz visiting Sam and Miranda for a long weekend (and er….work). Tomorrow morning Miranda starts her 6 month Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture at UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (http://casfs.ucsc.edu/training/index.html). Five days a week Miranda will be knee and elbow deep in dirt, plants and all things horticulture. Miranda only lives about 15 minutes away, but most people live on the campus in tents for the six months.

Today was “moving in” day….setting up tents, getting to know each other, etc. Sam, Mark and I took Miranda to school, helped her set up her tent (for the nights she’s too exhausted to drag herself home), and waved goodbye as she joined the other “kids”. It was sad to see our little girl leaving us

Assuming she’s not too tired at the end of the day Miranda will be writing about her experience there…if you’re interested you can read more at http://miranda.ujeni.net/blog/
Sam and Mark in front of Tent #29 (aka Miranda Robert’s Home)

Being self-employed is one of those double edge swords. Sure I get to stay in my pajamas till 4 in the afternoon but … well I’m still in my pajamas at 4 in the afternoon! I haven’t woken up to an alarm clock in over 2 years (except for the early airport run or fishing trip), but I don’t get paid “sick” leave either.

Well one of the perks that I like best is being able to go do things during off times. So last Thursday I headed out with my fishing buddy and banjo player extrordinaire Greg Lawless and Jack Mitchell, one of the best fly fishing guides in this region (meaning planet earth). We saw two boats the whole day and we caught over 20 - 30 fish with almost 90% caught on dry flies.
Winter and spring here in the Northwest can be a bit dreary with all the rain/hail/snow we’ve been having lately, so when the sun comes acalling you better go out and be in it … oh wait you have a job. You only get to look at it through conference room windows … well our conference room today was 11 miles around mercer island … I’ll trade you your Aeron chair for a bicycle any day …

On Tuesday we got back from our trip to visit Courtney and Arthur in Tanzania with my mom and dad. We had a great time….but we’ll post on that later. Our trip home took about 36 hours because we had a couple of really long layovers. The first one was in Nairobi and it was long by design. We were able to get a full 12 hours and made the most of it. We were picked up at the airport by Jonathan Campaigne (our old boss at Pride Africa) and went to the office to visit old co-workers and get an update on the status of DrumNet. After that we headed back to Jonathan’s house and had a wonderful dinner with some close friends: Tanja and Jarat (our next door neighbors while living in Nairobi) and Marco and Tessa (Marco, among other things, was our guide for our Schenk family trip in Kenya). It was great to see everyone, but made us wish, once again, that Kenya wasn’t so far away.

During dinner we mentioned that we had an 8 hour layover in Amsterdam. Marco and Tessa are both Dutch and told us that the train station was just below the airport and we could be in downtown in 15 minutes. Only mildly concerned about our ability to function normally after such a long flight, we agreed to visit Amsterdam. It turns out they were right about the ease of getting into town and at 7:30 am(!) Mark and I found ourselves at Central Station in the heart of Amsterdam. We spend the next few hours wandering the streets, walking up and down canals, and enjoying the chaos of thousands of bicycles that is Amsterdam rush hour. All in all it was a very fun, if unexpected, part of our vacation. Below are a few images from the morning.

There’s nothing like skiing on freshly groomed snow when you’re the first person to make a mark. And if you’re skating then corduroy is the ultimate….