Vacationland!

We went to Maine! We picked up Duchess (fresh from three weeks in Sweden) in the airport in Boston and headed north to visit family, experience the heat and humidity and mosquitoes of an East Coast summer, and have some classic Southern Maine adventures.

We spent a week by Sebago Lake, with appropriate amounts of swimming, kayaking, beach-sitting, shuffleboarding, ice cream-eating, LL Bean trips, and tennis. 

We played a round of traditional family Extreme Croquet, which Papa Big Cook won, AS ALWAYS. Antarctic Uncle gave the girls impromptu driving lessons in a stick-shift beater over the grass on his property. We got to take a sail on Casco Bay. We ate fish and chips and lobster rolls and soft-serve ice cream. It was a delight.

And then we spent half a day in Boston, revisiting a few places and recreating some photos from a visit a decade ago. 

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Catching up

 It's been a minute! And we've had adventures!

I went to Miami for work, thoroughly enjoyed it, never going back.

Then Cook and I left the girls at home for a week and went to New York City. (I told a coworker this was our first EVER vacation together without the kids, and she was horrified to the point that I got embarrassed about what I guess is yet another failure of Self Care.) This was utterly delightful. We went to museums (Transit Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters, Museum of the City of New York), we went to the Comedy Cellar like good tourists. We went to a bar to listen to live jazz, we visited a bunch of interesting city stuff (so many parks, the Roosevelt Island Tram, Stuyvesant Town, the East River Ferry, East Village community gardens). We ate a lot of good and/or interesting things (an egg cream soda, enormous Italian sandwiches, khachapuri, pickled kumquats, etc.). And while we were gone, the kids took excellent care of themselves and each other. So it was a triumph all around, totally worth waiting nearly 20 years.

 

And then I went on a short camping trip with a friend to a hot spring in southern/middle Oregon.

And now suddenly summer has begun! Skipper is done with school and looking forward to a summer of naps on the couch. Duchess is off in Sweden again, visiting family and friends and exploring on her own, but she'll meet us on the East Coast for a family visit to Maine. 

An interlude outside regular life

We took a mini-vacation! We drove to Cottonwood Canyon State Park and stayed two nights in a cabin, took a walk along the John Day River, and did a lot of reading. We saw a tiny snake and some medium-sized rabbits and contemplated how little we understand geology. It was lovely. 

Summer! We've had a couple of brutal heatwaves, a charmingly tiny canine houseguest who adores Skipper, some ultimate frisbee, and a trip to Seattle to see family and watch baseball. We finally get to moved back into our house (after exactly the kind of exhausting, overbudget, much-drawn-out renovation project that makes people tell you never to do a renovation).

Duchess had an early-summer trip to Sweden that she enjoyed enormously- it's hard not to be won over by Sweden at midsummer, and Duchess got three weeks of endless daylight, wild strawberries, swimming, weird lawn games, and excellent public transportation. Plus a million mosquito bites, but you can't win everything.

We took a road trip to eastern Oregon! We started off with a minor league baseball game in Washington.

Then we went south to Wallowa Lake to camp for a couple of nights, just as severe thunderstorms settled in the area.

We stopped to pay our respects to the confluence of the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Cook loves a confluence.

We also stopped for Dutch Bros, a great Oregon cultural tradition that Cook does not find appealing, being a black-coffee-acquired-cheaply-and-on-foot guy, so he insisted that we park and walk up to the window instead of driving through. 

Wallowa Lake is beautiful when it isn't pouring rain. 

Our activities were curtailed by the intermittent lightning and downpours, and by Duchess's stress fracture (preventing her from walking far), so we visited downtown Joseph and downtown Enterprise.

Cook and the girls bravely swam in the lake. I'm given to understand it was quite cold. 

We splurged and took a tram up to the top of a mountain. Duchess was not a fan of the tram, but Skipper really was.

We drove to Baker City, stopping in Lostine for coffee along the way, and then Lagrande to visit another bookstore.

Took a day in Baker City, visited the Oregon Trail wagonruts.

We drove to Bend, stopping for pie, ghost towns, and a very large wagon replica.

In Bend, we visited relatives and the Deschutes River. 

And then we came home! Eastern Oregon is really, really beautiful, and we were also so glad to return home!