Visitor From The Homeland

We had our first out of town visitor from Portland this weekend!  Tiffany (of Fizzy Party) drove out for a long weekend and in my frenzy to finish a few house projects, do a bit more unpacking and the usual pre-guest cleaning I forgot to figure out what the heck we were going to do for 2.5 days.  D'oh!

Tiny friends:Tiffany and I at the top of the "gorge" of the creek that runs behind our place.

We did some driving around, some window shopping, lots of dog appeasing, and plenty of chatting.  The "problem" with actually being there in the moment, is that sometimes photos don't get taken.  It's a trade off that is usually worth it.  BUT I can share some pics from our Saturday afternoon hike into the National Forest behind the house.  It's hard to go wrong with nature's majesty.

This was taking looking down to the creek from a spot near where we are standing in the first photo.

This is looking across to the other side of the creek. I LOVE icicles!

Whoa!  Look who we ran into while hanging around the cliff?  Nice view up the creek of the Bitterroot Range.

iPhone panorama shot: Now another person from the Portland area can verify what I've been saying about "a dry cold"!  It was about 35-40 degrees and Tiffany (who's never warm enough in summer to wear shorts) had to take off her coat.  For reals, y'all.

All this is a 15 minute hike from our house!  GAH!  We are some lucky folks!  It's weird how it's only 15 minutes there, but something like an hour to get back and that we leave from the back of the property and come back to the front.  How does that work, Eric?


Has spring sprung already?  If we get snow, rain and sun all in one morning in a Bitterroot spring, than I guess so.

Nice to spot a bright bit of color!  Anyone know what this is?  I hope it's not one of the invasive non-native species we've seen in pamphlets from the Forest Service.

In other news: Tiffany spotted part of a spinal column (four vertebrae with 3 discs, quite large) that I snapped up for future crafting, the Beastie Grrrlz slept like furry rocks that night, and Tiffany made us a great Japanese dish of Okonomiyake for dinner!   We ate it on my grandmother's wedding china that she was nice enough to pick up at my mom's and bring with her (along with a Trader Joe's care package).  Yummers!

And then "disaster" struck.  Not 10 minutes and 2 miles from my house, she realized she was having car trouble.  She called me, I drove down, and the car eventually started acting normally, but she decided to have a mechanic in town have a look and it turned out that it was not really safe to hit the highway, mountain pass, Columbia gorge, etc. with this issue.  The shop was able to overnight her part from, get this, Portland and she was stuck here for another day and a half.  The humans are in agreement that Betty sabotaged Aunt Tiffany's car so we could have a visitor for a little while longer.

The magic of homemade fire starters.

 A true trooper, Tiffany took this setback in stride.  She ate leftovers, she tagged along on my errands, she explored the Stevensville Drug store and soda fountain (malteds anyone?) with me, and kept me company while I made 96 more fire starters to get us through wood stove season (I hope).