Bicycling on Lopez Island
It’s a blustery day here in the Northwest, a good day to park ourselves in front of the keyboards. Scary proposition going outside anyway, with our massive poplar tree flinging limbs down like leafy spears. One went all the way across the yard and landed on our plum tree. Luckily didn’t hurt it, but a few plums may have gone tumbling. I’ll have my work cut out for me tomorrow picking all the branches up. Rain coming and going as well – though not as much as I hoped for. Maybe it all went east of us, which would be ideal, slow down the fires burning the state up.
Doesn’t get much more San Juan-y than this!
Lots of summer goings-on during August. Spent a weekend on Lopez Island with our good pals Tess & Ed a few weeks back, then went camping last weekend. We have come to the conclusion that we are getting too old to sleep in a tent. Especially the kind that are super light and meant for backpacking. Aside from the usual discomfort of sleeping on the ground, we nearly froze to death the first night. We were at a higher elevation near Mt. Rainier than we realized, and it was really chilly. Doug is now on a mission to have us get some sort of teardrop trailer. Definitely sounds nice, but also gives me a twinge of sadness. I love being outside, but I guess you just have to adapt.
Tess & Doug enjoying the view from Shark Reef Park
Lopez Island is wonderful – so unpopulated and flat – absolutely perfect for biking! Quite a trek to get there and back, so if we try to go again, gotta stay longer than a weekend. But we had time to just hang out, eat good food, read, and work on a puzzle.
We’ve now confirmed that Doug can paddle his kayak again! He still has a bit of trouble keeping his left hand in place, even with the “active hand” brace on, so he bought some stuff called Gorilla Snot (seriously) and hopefully that’ll help. We went out in a tandem Thursday with the Outdoors for All folks (they are so great) and had a really relaxing evening. There were about eight people out in all, so a nice size group. We don’t have a tandem, but hopefully we can try taking our boats out soon.
Dogs, cats and chickens are all good – new chicks have been laying eggs now for a few weeks, but haven’t quite gotten the hang of where the nest box is or its function. I keep finding eggs in random places, as though they just fell out while the chicken was doing something else. I don’t remember that issue with our first girls, but this bunch does seem a bit more…bird brained? Chickens aren’t exactly bright, but I guess like people, they can vary in their smarts. However, one of the new girls produced a HUGE egg last week that turned out to be a two-yolker, which is supposedly good luck. A-ha, I knew things were looking up!
And the true sign that fall is upon us – football is back! I’ll wrap this up to go watch the Seahawks take on the Chargers in pre-season game 3. Let’s hope the o-line can up their game and I sure would love to see some Beast Mode, I miss that dude. Go Hawks!
black cloud reflections 