Three Friends & Two Peninsulas

We've officially hosted our first visitor from Pennsylvania and after flying across the country to visit, we made her sleep on our floor because we have yet to get a replacement air mattress. Sorry Meg!!

Since our last blog post we've done a bit of local exploring including Lake Sylvia and Kurt Cobain Park. However, the real fun was taking a three day excursion around the Olympic Peninsula, which we were able to share with our great buddy from home, Megan.  She took a long weekend to make the trek west and take a peak into our currently abnormal lifestyle. 

We'll touch on local beauties first: Lake Sylvia is a state park in the town adjacent to Aberdeen. It allowed an easy afternoon trip to become experts at navigating with our new hand held GPS.  We stayed on track as we trudged along a wet, muddy trail in the pouring rain. 

Lake Sylvia
Luckily it's easy to navigate with or without a GPS!
 

The other spot we had yet to come across, but knew existed, was Kurt Cobain Park. It is named for the infamous lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana whose home town is our current place of residence, Aberdeen, WA. The park is quaint but a bit quirky and just a few blocks away from where Kurt Cobain grew up.  A golden retriever greeted us (then returned to his front porch post located next to the park) as we viewed the sculptures and memorial plaque set in place to remember the town's local musician. 
Two fun facts for you:
1. The last Nirvana album was From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, which is the river the park sits along (see picture below) and where Kurt did a lot of writing as he was growing up.
2.  Aberdeen's slogan printed on their Welcome to Aberdeen sign is "Come As You Are"... another Nirvana reference. 

Quirky: "Kurt's Air Guitar"

The Wishkah River at Kurt Cobain Park

Enough of this stuff...lets get to Megan's visit!  We spent this past weekend on the move after Meg's arrival on Thursday evening.  We only made her sleep on our floor for one night before heading out and then sleeping in cozy hotel beds.  We made time to show her around town, hit up a local breakfast hot spot then drove the 4.5+ hours to Port Angeles which is a northern town along the Olympic Peninsula where ferries run to Victoria, BC.  The weather was typical for the drive, quite a bit of rain; however there was a break in the clouds that allowed us to comfortably get out of the car and hit up the Pacific coast.

Beautiful scenery, beautiful people :)

We made it to Port Angeles with time to spare and were able to enjoy a leisurely night catching up.  We even had enough time to pick up equipment we needed for Saturday's adventure to Hurricane Ridge.  This is a place Charlie has been obsessed with since we knew we'd be spending winter on the peninsula.  It is within Olympic National Park and gets its name for hurricane speed winds (>74 mph).  It is open year round as long as the roads are passable and a great spot for winter snow shoeing, sledding, and skiing.  We were a little nervous about our plans because they closed the road on Friday due to high winds and white out conditions.  Luckily the weather unexpectedly cleared, the winds calmed, and we had fresh snow for snow shoeing!  Meg picked it up like a pro and we were off.  My favorite part was ending the day with a ranger guided snow shoe walk...I love to learn and rangers never disappoint. 



Look at all of that snow!!
Approximately 9.5 ft of snow, but who's counting.
The avalanche risk was considerable...eek!

Continuing around the Olympic Peninsula we made our way onto the Kitsap Peninsula and stayed in Bremerton, WA.  This town is home to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and is separated from the Olympic Peninsula by the U.S. Hood Canal.  Poor Meg gave her all during snowshoeing and ended up under the weather Saturday night.  Luckily we laid low in Bremerton, she was able to sleep in Sunday, and get some medicine in her system before we took a ferry back to Seattle where her journey began.  We didn't have an exact plan of attack for Seattle, but spent time at Pike's Place Market and filled our bellies with delicious local foods before heading toward the airport.  It was tough to say goodbye, but we were glad to have the time we did.

Seattle and the Puget Sound
I spy with my little eye...the Space Needle.

It was awesome to share our current life with a great friend, but definitely made me more acutely aware of how removed we are from "normal" daily commitments and routines.  Sure we go to work every day, make dinner, always have laundry and cleaning to tend...but our other time is spent planning excursions and adventures, organizing and applying to be licensed PTs in a 5th state, blogging and trying to stay in touch with family and friends the best we can when being 3 hrs behind...

"Normal" is always a relative term, but we've definitely found a nice routine for ourselves that is not for everyone.  We are now okay with sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags, sharing a family room with our bicycles, and buying only things we can eat or that will replace something else since we still need to fit everything into our Ford Escape.  It is pretty amazing to be able to slide into such an alternative lifestyle with someone you love...hopefully we can continue to slide this easily as our lives continue to evolve.  I'd say this was a good way to test out our sliding abilities!

After recovering from Meg's departure we're now prepping for the arrival of Mom and Pop Funk who will be entering Pacific Coast Time this coming Friday, March 1st.  They will be staying at a local hotel, not on our bedroom floor.  Stay tuned...

What a difference a year makes

It's hard to believe, but this time last year Amanda had already quit her job and moved back to Ephrata while I was finishing my last week at MossRehab and sleeping on the couch at my friend Meg's place. We had no idea what to expect, but all we were focused on was our grand vision of gallivanting across the U.S. together. Now here we are, all the way across the continent, living out our dream.

Sometimes we will just look through pictures and remember some of the great places we have been; Nashville, St. Louis, Yellowstone, San Francisco, and Yosemite, just to name a few. We will often comment how it seems like so long ago we did some of these things, but in reality it hasn't even been a year! Of course, it hasn't always gone according to plan, but that's been half the fun. It has also been a tremendous privilege to be able to use this forum to share our experiences with everyone and have you come along for the ride.

After returning back to Aberdeen from our very busy time at home in PA, we have continued exploring western Washington. A couple weekends ago we travelled to Woodinville, WA for the highly recommended Red Hook Brewery tour. It did not disappoint. For just $1, you are treated to a multitude of samples, history lessons, random information, and more samples. Fun fact about Red Hook: One of the owners is one of the founders of Starbucks. So not only is this guy making millions on Starbucks, but he is adding to his fortune with each delicious Red Hook sale. Some people have all the luck.

This is why we love Red Hook

We needed a few Red Hooks the following week though as we had some looooooong days at work. Our director of rehab recently resigned, so we are stuck in limbo until a new director is located. As a result, things are not running as smoothly as they should (not that things were all that efficient in the first place) and the paperwork began piling up. We eventually got caught up, but more than a few late nights in the office over the past two weeks have been necessary to do so. Fortunately though, our interim directors have been utilizing our feedback and are working to fix any issues and improve the way in which we do our documentation. It also helps that the other therapists we work with are fantastic people and make going to work a very enjoyable experience, even if you do happen to get out at 10:00 some nights and still have paperwork waiting for you the next morning!

Enough about work. Let's get to the real fun stuff, last weekends phenomenal adventure. I discovered this past weekend that God put me on this earth for one purpose. Snowshoeing. It might be too early to state this after only one time doing it, but I'm pretty sure I'm the best snowshoer ever. Ask Amanda, she'll back it up.

On Saturday we travelled back to Mt. Rainier with our co-workers Jen and Jared to play in the abundance of snow and to try out snowshoeing. After making our way through roads cut out of up to 12 feet of snow, we came to the area known as Paradise.

Snowplowing. Lots of snowplowing.

Here there was a snow park area for tubing and sledding. Since Jen and Jared are originally from Florida, they had never sledded. While I think it took longer to blow up the tubes than we actually spent using them, we made a few passes down the hills before we all took off on our ranger guided snowshoe walk.

Sledding at the base of a 14,411' mountain...check!

Jared and Jen's first ever attempt at sledding/tubing

Once on snowshoes, you can pretty much go where you want in the park. There's 12 feet of snow between you and the ground, so it's not as though you can really hurt any of the terrain. Both Amanda and I felt right at home on snowshoes. I was pretty much unstoppable. It felt so good that I was ready to climb to the summit in them. Amanda was no slouch either, as she kept trucking right along through the deep snow. After learning about all the behaviors of the animals brave enough to stay on the mountain during the winter months, the four of us headed out on our own. With our fancy new hand held GPS telling us where to go, we set out trekking across the mountain. We hiked past people digging snow caves, we went up to glacially carved overlooks, and up to a high enough elevation where both Mt. St. Helens and Mt Adams could be clearly seen in the distance. Snowshoeing is without a doubt our new favorite activity. It opens up a whole new wintry world that would otherwise be impassable (or at least really really difficult to traverse).

Who looks good on snowshoes? WE DO!

12' of snow is no problem at all



Views like this are why you get snowshoes

Snowshoeing at Mt. Rainier is just one example of the kinds of new experiences we have been exposed to since we completely altered our lifestyle about a year ago. While it has been, and will continue to be, incredibly tough to be away from family and friends, we feel that we are taking advantage of this whole experience as best we can. Thank you all for supporting us over this past year and we continue to look forward to sharing with you what is to come.

One final item to share. I think we are going to be ordering air bed number 4. It seems the replacement airbed from Coleman has sprung a leak. Looks like it's back to sleeping on the floor until we get this all figured out. Yet another one of the fun "experiences" of life as a traveller!