It's Been Awhile...
It's Been Awhile...
It certainly has been awhile since we've posted a Blog, that's because sometimes life just gets overwhelming.
We are finally getting a chance to catch our breath after an extremely busy Summer of working hard, traveling, and visiting friends & family.
It all started with the Oregon Country Fair, back in July. We love the OCF, but there's no denying that it requires an immense amount of work and dedication to make the trip a success -year, after year. OCF is only a 3 day festival, but when you factor in packing, driving, set-up, and clean-up it ends up being a solid week of work, not to mention the months of sewing Betsy must do to create enough inventory for the booth. To say the least, it is a huge effort for us to make it happen. This year rain created an additional obstacle, that extended the cleaning well into the following week. We arrived home in mid-July, to prepare for a busy month of visitors.
Betsy counted 18 different people that stayed at our house throughout the month of July! It was a fun month seeing family, and friends, but all the energy we spent hosting guests didn't leave us much time to prepare for the Anacortes Arts Festival.
We had an excellent time in Anacortes this year, as usual it was great to see some of our westside friends, soak up the coastal air, eat great food, and immerse ourselves in the amazing art that is present at the festival year, after year.
After the AAF, Betsy was absolutely exhausted and in desperate need of a break. We decided to pack up the truck and head to Canada.
We had big plans to climb lots of mountains, but the relentless rain and other unforeseen events deflated our dreams. Somehow we managed to salvage the trip, and got a fair bit of climbing in between storms. We got to check out some major tourist attractions, such as Lake Louise, along the way and narrowly missed an encounter with a Grizzly Bear.
We returned home in early September to catch up on work, and prepare for Winter. Betsy was busily catching up on orders that came while we were away, and Pitkin focused on building the giant woodshed we've been needing for years. Once the shed was complete he cut, split, and stacked 10 cord of wood to fill the new structure, just before we left for our next trip, a family wedding in Maryland.
We had a good time seeing Pitkin's family in Md., we attended the Grakin Wedding, and got lots of quality time with everybody, especially our nephews! We coordinated our trip with our semi-annual trip to the City of Rocks National Reserve in Almo, Id.
The City of Rocks is, without a doubt, our favorite climbing destination. It has some of the highest quality granite we've ever touched, and the best camping anywhere. We've never been disappointed by any of our trips to the City.
This trip was especially awesome because we had a crew of old friends from Whatcom co, and most of them had never been to the City! It was great to share some of our favorite spots with them, and explore new areas as well.
Now we are back home, and hunkering down for the winter. There's already snow in the mountains, and we are looking forward to sticking around our Valley and focusing on work for the next few months... and hopefully do some skiing too!
Cheers,
Betsy & Pitkin