We had heaps of fun throughout the remainder of June following our awesome backpacking weekend at Black Lake. Jay took off to spend a week doing research in Belize at
Carrie Bow Cay - a Smithsonian field station. While this was work-related, we all know that he has a blast visiting the tropics and working with his beloved corals. The only bummer was that a tropical depression came through while he was there and held the team off from diving, forcing them to scramble to get all their data collected when the weather finally cleared. When I see Jay's photos I can't help but wonder what the heck I was thinking when I started to specialize in temperate (cold) water fisheries. Why the heck didn't I go tropical too? Huh.
Windy Carrie Bow
Jay is not one to take photos of himself, so I have nothing to show you of my man in Belize. That said, he loves corals so this shot is perfect when it comes to representing him in his element.
The day that Jay flew back to WA our friends Susanna and Mike came to visit for a night with their nugget Jasper! I've known Mike since my days in Glacier Bay, Alaska which means we have been friends for over ten years now! Whoa. I actually remember meeting Susanna when she came to visit Mike in Glacier Bay - the two of them were heading off on an overnight paddle and I remember waving my greeting to Susanna from the shore. They live in Northern CA now and were on vacation in Washington for a week. Jay and I were stoked to make it into their itinerary! We had a fantastic dinner and conversation the night they arrived and the next day we got a nice hike in around Cranberry Lake in Anacortes. As for Jasper, I always worry when we have kiddos in the house because I have no toys to provide for fun. Well, Jasper had no problem finding "toys" in the house and he quickly adopted a neat metal candle jar that kept him entertained the entire time. Oh, and our cats were pretty interesting as well to a one-year old!
Mike and Susanna left on Friday afternoon and Jay and I jumped in our car the same day and headed down south to Corvallis, OR to visit our friends Britton and Erik for the weekend. Typical of I5 traffic, what should have been a five hour drive turned into more and more hours and hours and hours. We arrived at their place around 1am?? or was it 2am? I can't remember because it all turned into a blurrrrrrr. On Saturday Jay headed off to meet with a faculty member at Oregon State University who studies coral/algal symbioses and I got to spend the morning in the warm sun on a nice walk with Erik and Britton. What a great town!
Yummy
No stay with Erik is complete without an awesome meal. Actually we had several awesome meals....but here he is perfecting polenta pizzas.
The next day Britton went to work in her lab and the remaining three of us went for a very, very, wet hike. This shot was taken pre-downpour - too bad I didn't take a photo post downpour because we were all soaked. What kind of Pacific Northwesterners are we if we think we don't need raincoats?
Newt!! At least it was happy about the rain.
Post-soaking we drove to the
Airlie Winery and tasted some wine with all the awesome winery animals. What a great place! We bought some wine and sat outside on their picnic table and devoured a tasty lunch with a fantastic dry rosé .
Following that lovely weekend we came home to the warm, sunny weather in Anacortes. In Washington it is fairly typical for July and August to be bone dry (while it rains the rest of the year). This year the drought appears to have arrived a bit early and we have no complaints about that! Here I am with our own homegrown strawberries and spicy
mesclun mix. Yum! The bounty of summer makes you wonder how you survived through winter.
More photos from June are here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/111221596171793333099/June2013?authkey=Gv1sRgCL2Ql7aeluCu0wE&noredirect=1
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