Spring travels both local and far

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! 

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!

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.

April photos are here: https://goo.gl/photos/YoxXuWRkqCAbmCBs8

May photos (I still need to upload photos from our paddle in BC) are here: https://goo.gl/photos/cYjjHSd5R389PZ9k9

November was a blast!

November was a blast! We spent it mushrooming, hiking, and with my parents who decided to play tourist (with us) in Seattle to take in all the sights of the city before coming up to Anacortes.

At the beginning of the month we hit up the boletes in Oregon while visiting our friend Jennifer. She always managed to find the best boletes (as seen in the photo to the left). While she was picking some nice, young, fat, beauties...I found some tall, maggot-infested, skinny boletes. What the heck? Well, we salvaged some parts of my mushrooms, used all of Jennifer's (and Jay's), and had an awesome wild bolete pizza dinner at her house that night.

I redeemed myself by finding these beauties the next day - maggot free! Woohoo! Jennifer told us that she tried grilling boletes once and the results were fantastic. These gorgeous kings (king boletes) were destined for our grill back in WA.

Crazy to think that Jennifer and I have known each other for 14 years! Whoa. And Jay has known her for 11! Time flies when you are surrounded by great friends.

Here is Jay with the biggest king bolete from our foray!

This is what you look like when you open up a bolete and discover it is maggot free and ready for the grill!

Dinner back in WA - grilled boletes with a rosemary butter and a quiche made with the other species of mushroom we found, shaggy manes. All of this was paired with a wine from Challenger Ridge - one of our favorite Skagit County wines.

After our big mushrooming weekend we got to look forward to a visit from my parents! For a while we were not completely sure if the visit was going to happen because my father had been having some back issues and needed to have surgery only a few weeks before their planned visit. But he recovered well enough for a torturous plane ride and a visit that worked out fine once he was off the plane. Whew.  My parents had been wanting to spend some time exploring Seattle and November was a great time to do it. You see, when the weather is nice we just want to be in the mountains...but come November rains, we just want to be in a good restaurant sipping great wine or a WA brew.

So we did just that - we hit up the breweries! Well, at least we did with my father. My mom had tickets to spend Friday evening and all day Saturday at the Key Arena with Oprah. She loved it! But since Oprah wasn't our thing, we took my Dad on a brewpub tour in Seattle!

When my mom got out of Oprah's show on Friday evening we all headed up to the top of the Space Needle for a night time view of Seattle. It was a crisp, clear, and unusually freezing night in Seattle!

The next day my mom returned to spend the day with Oprah and the three beer drinkers headed out on our own mission! We went to Seward Park and then to two breweries (The Woods and Elliot Bay Brewing Company). That evening we headed off to the Dahlia Lounge, a well-known restaurant in downtown Seattle, to celebrate two birthdays (Jay and my father).

The next day was a crazy, jam-packed, tourist day in Seattle. We went out on a cruise of the harbor and then we planned on heading straight to the Museum of Flight....but my mother got side-tracked by the giant ferris wheel. Next thing we knew, we were all in line for the ferris wheel and up we went!

We made it to the Museum of Flight a bit later than expected, but we still had time to check out the Concorde in the pouring rain.

After playing tourist all day, we decided we needed to visit one more brewpub. So here we all are at Elysian! Jay and I drove back to Anacortes that night and worked the following day.... but the next day (Tuesday) was Veteran's Day so we headed back to Seattle to spend one more day with my parents in the city before all four of us went back north to Anacortes.

We spent the entire day freezing our butts off at the zoo. Jay and I had never been to the zoo in Seattle before - so this was fun for us too. Except it was so damn cold for Washington. Turns out a typhoon was hitting Alaska (yes, I said that....it was a massive storm as big as Hurricane Sandy but no one paid attention to it) and the power of that storm was sucking all the cold Arctic air down into the lower 48 states. In a state that is always 50 degrees (plus or minus 10), temperatures in the 30s are shocking. Will I ever be able to live in New England again or has WA turned me into a cold temperature wimp? I was feeling rather wimpy at the zoo.

Back in Anacortes we continued to have clear, gorgeous, and extremely cold weather. We went for a short walk in Washington Park in Anacortes. It didn't last too long - look at my mom!!

The top of Mt. Erie is a great place to take in the alpenglow on the Cascades! It was cold but so clear we could even see Mount Rainier far far off in the south.

It was sad to say goodbye to my parents, but it wasn't as hard as normal because I knew we would see them again in a month over the holidays. Speaking of holidays - Jay and I spent Thanksgiving together at our house. Even though we were happily alone, we cooked enough to feed a freakin' army. Jay roasted an entire turkey for himself (maybe the kitties got a bite or two) and I made phyllo dough mushroom rolls with a Georgian (the country, not state) walnut sauce. Brussel sprouts, squash, pomegranate seeds, and stuffing completed the meal. Next time we will try and have some other people over to help us eat all the food!

I had to stick this photograph in for fun even though it happened in December and not November! When we got back from Panama, Jay (inside at the helm) and his coworker Nate (on the bow) swung by my office in the new research vessel for Shannon Point Marine Center. Jay and Nate skipper the research vessels for SPMC and they were taking this boat into La Conner for fuel. It was really exciting to check out the lab's new sexy boat!

Photos from November (and December minus Panama) are here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/111221596171793333099/NovemberAndDecember2014?authkey=Gv1sRgCO32zoHF4YSsoQE

Fun fall foraging and meandering

John Day Fossil Beds National Monument - Painted Hills

The last few weeks have been extremely busy at work but also busy with play (typical in the Barber-Dimond household). The Tribe that I work for (Swinomish) just recently purchased almost 50 acres of tidelands and wanted me to work up a lot of information on potential uses of these tidelands (i.e. maybe we could grow shellfish?). Pretty exciting but also a bit funny since my background is in benthic ecology and I don't know a thing about farming shellfish! Steep learning curve for Julie at work! Lucky for me, I was about to head to Oregon for a three-day shellfish growers conference. I had been planning on going well before this tideland purchase in order to present some research I had worked on (with several collaborators) involving decadal change in bivalve populations on a gorgeous area of Reservation tidelands. It turns out that in addition to presenting these data, I was also jumping into the world of farming shellfish and I was able to talk to a lot of very experienced growers and learn about the ins and outs of shellfish farming. New and exciting stuff on the job!

I mentioned the shellfish growers conference right? Well it was held in Sunriver, OR which is right next to stunning Bend, OR. Jay and I had been to Sunriver in the winter of 2012 (see this blog: http://jj-adventure.blogspot.com/2012/02/bachelor-oregon-ski-trip-we-had-awesome.html) but had never been there in the summer or fall! Too bad Jay had to work! Well, I guess I was working too - but it was great to work in the Oregon high desert for a few days instead of soggy WA tidelands. I did manage to sneak in some play time though. Lucky for me, our good friend Ralph was recently hired as a shellfish biologist at another tribe in WA and he was also going to the meeting as well. Thw two of us decided to leave a day early and check out the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument before hitting Sunriver and the conference. We had a blast together and I was thrilled to have a driving buddy who really wanted to do all the driving so I could (1) work on finishing my talk for the conference and (2) knit!

It took Ralph and me about eight hours of driving to get to the tiny town of Dayville, OR. What a funny experience. We knew this was going to be in the middle of nowhere Oregon, so we called the only tiny hotel in town around 5pm to ask if we could get a room for the night. The dude that answered the phone was already drunk, slurring his speech, and not thrilled with the idea of us arriving at *shock* 8pm. But he claimed we could call him and wake him up and he would give us a room upon our arrival. Hmmmm. So we arrive - it is raining and dark out and he shows up in a golf cart, whiskey strong on the breath. He attempts to charge my card, the charge appears to go through but he is too drunk to understand this and seems concerned that the charge didn't go through. With much discussion we were able to convince him we paid (and we did pay) and he shows us our awesome little room with two beds and a bathroom. Ralph asked him where we could go to get dinner and he just laughed at us. Ha! There wasn't a light on in this tiny town at 8pm. Good thing I brought beers and some pesto pasta. Ralph and I nuked the pasta, drank some beers, called our respective significant others, and had a good laugh about the drunk dude in the OR desert and hit the beds.

In the morning, our play day, we hit the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument for a morning hike.The visitor center was closed because of the sequester on Monday (and it has been closed since due to the government shutdown, damn the selfish freakin' Republicans living in the 1600s). But we were able to hike on the trails as these had not been closed. The trails are not that long in any of these units, so we hiked on the longest trail we could find - three miles around a spot called the Blue Basin. You can see why it received this name from the photos above, the clay sediment was very blue/green in color. The entire area was completely stunning and a landscape that rivals Bryce Canyon or other open spaces in the Southwest. We were stoked. But we never found any fossils. Oh well!

Our next stop was the Painted Hills unit in the National Monument. It is easy to see why they named this area "Painted Hills" from this photograph. I could not have dreamt of better lighting on the hills with stormy thunderclouds in the distance and low evening light on the hills. It was amazing. 

There was one spot where you could walk right up to the painted hills....which are really big mounds of clay. We did not touch the mounds, as the park service didn't want us messing with the clay, but it was so neat to be walking IN the mounds of clay. Ralph and I were thrilled!

On our way out to Bend, we noticed tons of blue birds! At first we thought they were swallows since they were in a large flock and the flew like sparrows. But they were too blue. I've consulted my bird book and I'm thinking we saw mountain bluebirds. Do you agree? There are more photos here: https://picasaweb.google.com/111221596171793333099/October2013?authkey=Gv1sRgCOLO-O_-3pr-9gE  Do tell me who you think this bird is!

I was really busy the next three days at the conference and didn't bother to take photos of lots of scientists giving talks in front of a podium! I learned a LOT, had a great time, and enjoyed catching up with many of my colleagues. Ralph and I carpooled back to WA together as well - with only one quick stop on the long drive at Newberry National Volcanic Monument. I have a thing for volcanic landscapes and this place did not disappoint. We were walking about on an old volcanic lava flow. How cool is that!???

Good ol' friends from the Stan Cobb lab days! If you look closely you can see Mt. Bachelor and the South Sister in the background.

Newberry National Volcanic Monument and Mt. Bachelor

 

Massive wind farm on the drive through the Columbia River Valley. Who says renewable energy isn't sexy?

 

The weekend before the shellfish conference Jay and I hit the forest for some mushrooms. Chanterelle season arrived early on the west coast! If anything, we were a little late. We know of a few patches of these beauties and we headed straight to the spots! It was hunting season and we were off the trail, hence our awesome vests. But hey, we didn't get shot and we got tons of chanterelles. Does it get much better than that? Well, it does. We had cream of chanterelle soup that night with a crisp white wine and a rustic sourdough bread. Now that is good stuff.

Orange = chanterelles

After the shellfish growers conference, I arrived back in Anacortes to a treat! Jay's dad was visiting! Buz Dimond also arrived that day and was staying with us over the weekend. Too short of a visit, but a great visit nonetheless! Buz spent the day at work with Jay on Friday while Jay did some boating work and we went to Lopez Island (San Juan Islands) together on Saturday.

Iceberg Point on Lopez Island

Father and son!

Our October is jam-packed with fun. We have a mushroom foraging weekend planned as well as some fun local activities in WA. And we leave in a month for Madagascar! Can't wait!! Not that we have plans yet, but we were never known for planning our vacations. =)