Our Weekend

I've been a little stressed lately.

So last weekend we didn't clean the house or do much laundry or wash the dishes. I don't think we checked our mail for a day or two (take that bill collectors!).

Instead, we got in the car and drove to Deception Pass and went geocaching.

Geocaching is pretty fun. I call it my "old lady" thing. I guess it is what people do when they retire and want to have fun. But I digress. It's also one of the kids' favorite things to do. We had MoMo this weekend, so it was sort of expected that we would do SOMETHING fun.

The basic gist of geocaching is that you have a GPS device and you go on the internet to geocaching.com and look up caches in the area you want to go. You get the coordinates and a few clues and then you go hunt for a hidden treasure.

Like a real treasure hunt!

I printed off (or rather hand wrote, since our printer is dead dead dead) a few of these geocaches and off we went.

The first one was on the way to Deception Pass on Chukanut Road. This is by far our favorite drive. In fact, when we first bought our car in 2002, and we couldn't sleep at 2am because we were so excited and thinking about our new car, we drove here in our pajamas.
It's pretty.

I tried to take some nice pictures, but Nathan was driving, and he really likes this road. So they were all a bit blurry.

But anyways, you get the jist. There are trees and cliffs and the magnificant ocean.

We got to the first geocache, and let the kids out to find it.

Apparantly, there was also some bum scratching and rock climbing. BUT, the cache was found! We forgot to bring things to trade, and Zoe was pretty upset that she had to leave some fantastic pirate tatoos behind (we ended up going back the next weekend and grabbing them for her!).

And then we were off to our next drive by destination: The Long Horn Saloon! We didn't actually stop here this time, but on Nathan's birthday we rode his scooters out here. We were the only non Harley riders and were a bit intimidated, but it was pretty fun to eat here and pretend to be tough.

We kept driving.
Pretty soon we were a long ways from the city and the busyness and the stress.
Pretty soon, this is all that surrounded us:

And let me tell you, it felt GOOD!
We kept going, since we had another geocache that we wanted to find, and we (meaning Nathan)ended up making a wrong turn.
In our history of weekend adventures, the majority of them involve wrong turns and subsequent adventures. Even though we own not one but TWO GPS devices, we are wrong turn and subsequent adventure taking masters. This one time on our honeymoon we made a wrong turn while walking around San Francisco. We ended up finding this amazing tiny fortune cookie factory squeezed into an alleyway shop. Another time in Bellingham, we took a wrong turn and found a seemingly homeless trailer full of Vespas (Nathan about had a heart attack and ran into the house nearest the trailer and, long story short, the trailer and it's trove are now his). Wrong turns on our weekends to British Columbia are also exciting since they tend to take us several hours to re-orient ourselves, but have enabled us to find amazing places, like Granville Island.
So Nathan made a wrong turn and as we are turning into the next available turn around parking lot area we see this sign:

That's the coffee roaster sign, not the BreadFarm sign, that we were interested in. And yes, that is my finger at the top of the picture. It was bright out, and there was one of those intimidating Harley Biker Guys looking at me like I was crazy to take a picture of the store front sign.

But, the picture was a must because Nathan loves coffee, and we are trying desperately to start our own coffee roasting business, with coffee delivery on his Vespas. Of course, we went inside where we found the most amazing selection of homemade muffins and local wines. There was also the cutest little coffee roaster in the corner. Unfortunately, the guy who does the roasting wasn't in at the time. We'll have to try again later (darn, I'll get to eat another muffin).

Our final destination was the gift shop just past the Deception Pass bridge. We got there and parked and went inside. This geocache was a little harder. You had to go to the originally posted coordinates where a second set of coordinates were hidden. After you type the new coordinates into your GPS you had the final hiding spot. Someone took a lot of time to set up this cache. It was brilliant, and I'm not going to give it away at all, because really, you ought to try out this geocaching thing. It is so much fun. The girls finally got to trade a few items and they picked out a toy horse and a gold polar bear pin, and then we headed home. Only we took another wrong turn, but sort of on purpose, because the kids were chanting,

"I WANT TO GO TO THE BEACH."

And so we went,

because really,

who doesn't?

And that, right there, the heaving of the waves and the skipping of the stones, that is what made the last of the stress melt away.


Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh....
don't you feel better now?