Lisa Lake

This weekend we decided to get out of town for a change of scenery. We drove about 45 minutes out the AK highway towards Tok. There is a small public use cabin about a mile ski off the the highway at Lisa Lake. We figured it was a great trip to do with Wyatt becuase it was pretty close to home and a quick trip in and out.


It was still a pretty big load of junk even though we were only going overnight.

I skied in wearing my pack and pulled Wyatt in the Chariot (we love that thing!) and Jeff snowshoed in wearing a pack and pulling the sled with a load of firewood.


The cabin- its really nice sitting right on the lake and has gorgeous views of the mountains.

WWe had pretty nice weather, about 18 degrees and a bit of wind but not too bad.

After we got to the cabin I hung out with Wyatt and got settled in while Jeff went out exploring to find the trail that went out the the Johnson river. Rob and Ellen Skijored in for a short visit in the evening. Ellen and I hooked up her dogs and went for a ski while the boys hung out at the cabin.

Wyatt had fun playing with this nice pink and purple lounge chair that was left at the cabin- Kim has ruined him, we are going to have to take a teepee with us everywhere we go!

Tecate REALLY needs to work on his lap dog manners!!

Mancha found a cozy spot to snuggle down.

Everyone sacked out. Where do Jeff and I get to sleep?
Wyatt did pretty well sleeping away from home. No problems going to sleep but there was an awful lot of squirming about during the night.

Packing up and heading for home the next morning. Jeff took the packs in the sled on the way back. I was happy to have a lighter load.

Super fun trip. We don't know why we haven't been out there before but we are already making plans to go back this summer and do some fishing.

Delta Dog Daze

The annual Delta Dog Daze ski/dog race was held the first weekend in March this year. We hosted the race at our place and ran the trails out our back door. Ellen was the official race marshall and did most of the prep work on the trail and food for post race party. This was the last race of the season. Jeremy was the overall winner of the series this year. You can check out the website Rachel put together which has lots of photos- Race hard play hard, there is a link to it on my sidebar. We didn't get too many photos this year and seemed to have missed all the dogs..opps. If I remember right we had 2 mushers, 5 skijorers, 5 skiers, 2 beer guards, 1 babysitter and 1 timekeeper.


Ellen giving the pre-race briefing.


A few of the ladies gearing up.


Rob, one of the beer guards, heading out to the beer stop at the midpoint along the trail. You get time deducted from your race time for each drink you consume along the way.


Jeff stayed home with Wyatt so Mama could get out on the trail.

Rachel had her thinking hat on this year..which also doubled as a beer hat, allowing her hands free drinking on the trail. Too bad her tubes froze-up!

Rachelle is ready to go.

Gwen is almost ready to go.

Steve and Tamara are back home having a post race snuggle. So cute!!

Wyatt is having his one drink minimum to qualify for the race.

Wyatt Update

Wyatt is now 14 months old!! He is not full-on walking but getting closer everyday. He is now walking about five feet between things and is standing unspported a lot more often and for longer periods of time. But boy can this kid talk, Jeff and I just made a list of all his words and we came up with 52!! Granted the majority of those words would required some parental interpretation and we did include all his animal sounds. But it has been really fun being able to communicate with him. Oh he is also still using his baby signs, I think he has about 15 that he uses on a regular basis.

Here is Wyatt enjoying his new favorite toy that Kim got for him in Seattle. He calls it his "tee tee".
The weather has been really nice lately so we have been trying to get out and enjoy it...who knows if it will really last.


Wyatt LOVES to go visit the goats and the chickens. He satnds on his chair in front of the window pointing at the barn, making goat noises and saying "me, me".

Seattle '08 Part 2

We spent another day wandering around the streets and ended up in Chinatown. Kim found a neat little tea shop and signed us up for a tea tasting. It was really fun, we learned a lot about tea, the intricacies of serving tea and got a good caffeine buzz.


Kim showing proper pinkie posture.

Next we headed around theblock to a chinese "hot pot" resturant. They bring a burner and a big pot of soup to your table. Then they bring this huge plate of veggies and meat and and a bunch of little mixing bowls. We were a little confused and the lady's English wasn't the best but in the end we figured out that you just toss stuff in and cook it. And don't look too closely at what is coming out of the depths of the pot. I tried to convince myself that the pork balls she identified for me were just little balls of made of pork meat and not the other sort of balls :)

As you can tell by the look on my face we were amazed by the amount of food brought to the table.

Our friendly server kept a close watch on us and would come back everytime we made a comment to one another about something. I think she was worried about us and that we were not enjoying it, but it was fantastic!

We had planned on doing this underground tour of the old streets of Seattle but we missed the last tour of the day but we decided to walk down and find the office anyway. As we were walking toward the office the tour group was coming down the sidewalk towards us and we joked that we could probably just do an about face and join right in without anyone really noticing. Just then a guy in the group says, "Hey you laides should join us"....so we did. and long story short we got away with it but we couldn't enjoy the first 30 minutes or so becuase we were afraid we would get busted at any moment. We are SO bad :)

What Seattle used to look like. I won't give you the history lesson here, but it is really interesting. Call Kim she'll tell you about it.
The streets above the tour. The manhole cover you can see here is the one pictured below from underground.
As we neared the end of the tour and were just about to go underground for the last time, Kim and I decided to make a break for it just in case they planned on nabbing us at the end. So after most of the group went down the stairs we darted off down the block and out of sight :) I hope nobody thinks less of us for being such criminals.

That night we ended up at a Irish pub and this great group of muscians were having a jam session.
We befriended this young love sick little puppy. He had been coming to this bar every weekend for 3 weeks from Portland to be near his soul mate who was waitressing here. Only thing is that he doesn't really even know her and she has no idea how he feels....well she probably has an idea or thinks he is some freako stalker. Anyway he poured his heart out to Kim and I- pretty nice guy.

Hanging at the bar.On our way back to the hotel we stopped at a fancy club that was having Salsa band so we stopped in for a couple fancy drinks and a little dancing.
Being a tourist...Kim made me do it.

The space needle, pretty expensive just to get a nice view, but it was a very nice view. Again check out those blue skies!!

My favorite saying of the trip was- "I am not in Delta anymore".

We also went to the Experience Music Project museum that was really cool, and was pretty much our last stop of the trip.

We were too tired to even go clothes shopping on our last day, too many fancy drinks the night before I guess. We did have a nice dinner at the New Orleans resturant and enjoyed some mellow Blues and Jazz music.

Super fun trip and it was really nice to spend time with such a great friend. Thanks Kim, lets do it again soon!!!

Oh and I should note that Jeff and Wyatt did just fine without Mama. The house was even pretty clean and I couldn't detect any major injuries on Wyatt.

Seattle in February

In mid February Kim and I spent a long weekend in Seattle- My first trip without Wyatt! We had orignally planned on going somewhere warm but time and money got in the way so we opted for Seattle, little did we know we would still get the warm weather. It was gorgeous the whole time, blue skies and temps in the 50's. We got hotel right downtown, it was so nice to walk everwhere and eat outside. We had a blast! The first night we went to a concert at the Showbox. The opening band was the Felice brothers and the main show was the Drive-by Truckers. We had never heard of either band and they were not really our kind of music but we had fun chatting with some friendly biker dudes and just people watching. We thought the Felice brothers were better, the only way we could describe the Truckers was head banger country. It was pretty hard and heavy music and difficult to understand any lyrics- maybe we are just getting a little older :)





We grabbed breakfast from a fancy little bakery and ate in this park down by the water. Check out the green grass!!



We spent a lot of time checking out all the great stuff at the public market.

We bought some yummy pasta.





We watched the dudes throwing fish at the Pike Place Fish Market







We braved the long line for the famous doughnuts that were also thrown for you. He hadn't missed one until I got the camera out :)

We drooled over all the incredible produce.

Kim solidified her fish purchase, she is buying a couple of these cool steel salmon for her house.
Lots of funny characters on every corner. I had to donate $$ for the 13 cats this guy is caring for after taking this picture.

We also stumbled upon these guys from Ecuador- reminding us of our first big adventure together. I think they were worried Kim was going to take off with their loot- pay backs :)

more green vegetation!