A Very Needed Not Ready to Come Back to Reality Break

I am kind of a planner. (I hear your heads nodding. Glad we agree.)  And since last year we took all of our vacation time for our honeymoon and the rest of 2012 had no breaks, I decided in March to just pick dates that Jake and I could take some getaways this summer.  Picking dates ended up being a really good thing, with Jake's work load this summer, I'm not sure that we would have escaped otherwise.  

Last Saturday we got back from our last summer adventure, a 10 day road trip to and from Oregon.  We needed to go.  We were both ready to lay reality aside for a time and rest.  It was a good finale to the summer and rejuvenation for the near future.

While I would say the whole trip was great, we did have it was great 'even though' moments.  Such as not getting to; hike Strawberry Mountain Lake Trail, hike & camp in Hells Canyon, hike to the Stanley Hot Springs, and cross Lolo Pass in ID.  Idaho and Oregon are having some pretty bad fires right now and so we were pretty disappointed about having to detour these as my friend from ID had really talked them up.

'Even though', we had a great time with Lee and Chel and enjoyed the new sites that we got to see.  

 

Smith Rock State Park (left) Koosah Falls along the McKenzie River (right)

Rafting/Fishing at Carmen Reservoir

 Hiking along the Overlook Trail on the Oregon Coast (left) Yay for the Mazda! (Right)

Peaches right off the tree from Washington.  They were SOO good. (left) Potosi Hot Springs, MT (Right)

The Helmet (left) and at the summit of Sphinx Mountain (right) in Montana.

More pics can be seen here. 

I didn't take many pictures after Montana, mostly because it was dark and we were driving and ready to be home.  But we do have a lovely memory from Wyoming.  We had to drive through Yellowstone or go hours out of the way. It's $25 just to drive through the park!! How lame!  So we ended up stopping at a couple of the geysers, just to get our money worth.  At the time of our first stop, 2 tour buses filled with Asians pulled up.  Jake had started walking up the plank before me and ended up being swept away in the crowd of rather short, quickly moving Asians.  He kept looking back at me with a lost expression on his face, which I had no pity but could only laugh at.  Then, they all stopped and started taking pictures with their insanely high tech cameras.  I might add that they were oohing and ahhing quite loudly.  This 

allowed me to catch up and us both to see that it was of... a...chipmunk.  That was the highlight of Wyoming : )  

After getting back, we had lots of vegetables to pick.  Which meant Sunday was a great day to have people over to help us eat; we made grilled pizza, ate veggies, and canned pizza sauce.  The canning was a little too much to bite off after just getting back, but it was a fun evening of catching up with some of those that we love.