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| Tulips bloom in Skagit County |
What the heck have we been up to since March? Tons of fun stuff and some boring house renovations! My parents visited in early April, around the end of April we headed to Michigan for my cousin's daughter's wedding, we went morel hunting, we drank wine and ate great food, and we have hiked, paddled, etc. all over the place. Oh - and we tore out our old shower/tub and have been retiling the bathroom and making the master bath one gorgeous fancy bathroom!
I've kind of gotten into the tulips since we live about 15 minutes away from all the fields. Visiting during the week helps, I think I would hate it if I had to visit the fields on insanely crowded weekends.
The star couple in Skagit County!
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| https://www.hairofthedog.com/ |
We spent a weekend in Portland, OR drinking the local brews, eating at food trucks and nice restaurants, checking out the giant Farmer's Market, finding our inner zen at the Chinese and Japanese Gardens, basking in the warm sun, and exploring the Columbia River Gorge. It was lovely!
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| http://www.cascadebrewingbarrelhouse.com/ |
We found a brewery that specialized in sour beers! Damn good!
We grabbed breakfast at the
Fried Egg I'm in Love food truck and I grabbed coffee from this lovely Egyptian man at
Tov Coffee and Tea who knew his beans in the double-decker red school bus with the purple interior. Ahhh Portland is so weird and so awesome.
On our drive back to WA we spent the day wandering around the Columbia River Gorge trying to see as many waterfalls as possible for my mother (who keeps count, I promise).
My parents love all the murals around Anacortes! Actually, I do too. This was a fun and sunny day when we wandered around the town and checked out Deception Pass State Park....we have to visit that park as a rule!
Saying goodbye to my parents is usually pretty tough, but it wasn't so bad this time around because I knew we were going to meet again in Michigan for my cousin Troy's daughter's wedding. So I had a blast the following weekend with my friends in Anacortes at the Spring Wine Festival. Never the most amazing wine, but always the best time and views! O.K.....there was some good wine there.....but I know that a lot of the top vineyards are waiting for the big festival in Seattle so they don't come up to Anacortes.
I spent three days in Vancouver at the
Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference where I managed to find time for one jog in Stanley Park. What a treat! I love this city and all the good Asian food.
Jay and I headed off to Michigan at the end of April for Erin and Marco's wedding. I arrived a day before Jay and spent the day with my parents wandering around the town of Paw Paw, where my parents lived 49ish years ago. They had memories of a water balloon fight on this little island with my grandfather! We also found the two houses they had lived in and discovered the hole-in-the-wall yet amazing
Paw Paw Brewing Company. The most crazy thing was when my mom went in search of her old office with MI Cooperative Extension Service....she found their office and they had a photo of her at age 22ish on the wall! So cool! My parents were also determined to taste some Michigan wine in memory of drinking strawberry wine 49 years ago when they didn't really know their wine. I was skeptical but got dragged into
Warner Vineyards anyway and my mother (mom!!) announced to the man pouring us our tastings that I wasn't convinced their wine was going to be any good! Ahhhh...mothers. Verdict? Most of the wine was not great but their Chardonnay and one other white (can't remember the grape) was not that bad!
The real reason why we were all there was family. My family rarely gets to see our relatives in Michigan, so heading out for Erin and Marco's celebration was well worth it. Here is my cute dad with bride Erin, his grandniece. They had their ceremony at a
brewery as well - and I had a great beer that had been aged in a whiskey barrel. Yummy.
Cousins - Troy, Julie, and Todd
My mom tried to get a big family shot after the professional photographer left and she snapped this funny photo of the group.
Michigan is supposed to be a huge morel producing state, so I was stoked when Erin's wedding happened to occur at what I assumed would be the start of the morel season. So naturally Jay and I dragged my parents around to state parks in search of this lovely fungi (they didn't mind and they even helped search). I had a feeling we were hitting it right - the right habitat, the right temperature, right time of year, etc.....but since we are used to finding morels in recently burnt forests, this intact forest thing was new to us. We confirmed that I thought we were hitting it right when my mother spotted a man in the parking lot for a walking trail with some big gray morels in his hands. That made me go a little psycho and off we went into the forest.
One nice thing about WA is that while we have deer ticks, they are really small in population size compared to central and eastern states. If I was going on a serious morel hunt in Michigan, I would have used bug repellent and worn different clothes. But I flew here....so here was my "anti-tick" defense. Pretty lame.
After all of that we found one stinking morel (oddly shaped for a morel, but it was a morel and not a verpa if you are a mushroomer and wondering about our ID skills). Would you believe that we dragged it all the way back to WA with us? Well, we did. But it deflated on the flight to Seattle and made my entire bag smell like that dirty sock morel smell. Damn it.
Fast forward a few weeks to our visit to the eastern side of the Cascades where I had mapped out numerous burns from last summer to check out. It has been a very dry spring....and this didn't bode well for finding the motherload.....but we have a few tricks up our sleeves for finding the right habitat. We searched and searched and searched. After three failed searches we were feeling demorelized (ha ha!) but the fourth burn turned up the first morel of the season. And then more and more....we found moisture at the right elevation and aspect. And it was perfect. They were everywhere as long as you don't mind crawling around on your hands and knees for hours. I love mushroom hunting!
Count all the morels! Take some guesses below in the comments.
I found the first morel, but Jay took the prize for finding the biggest morel. Holy shit. This beauty was stuffed with figs, fontina cheese, caramelized shallots and then grilled. We don't mess around.
This is my "we are kick ass bad ass morel hunters" face. 15 pounds ladies and gentlemen. Fifteen pounds. But I'm not bragging. Nope.
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