Mt Baker is a local mountain about 3 hours north of us, right near Bellingham and below the Canadian border. The mountain is supposedly a great place for skiing and snowboarding because it is super powdery (it set the world record for snowfall one year with 95 feet of snow!) and not too crowded. But, because it's far for a day trip, we haven't really explored it at all. Since we had the extra day for MLK weekend, we made a last minute decision to head up that way and finally check it out.
We had quite the adventurous day skiing! Since Nora is now skiing, I bought a ticket too and skied with her for a good chunk of the day. This was my first time on a lift and down a run since Evie was born 9 years ago! While I went with Nora, Scott took Evie on her first ever blue and black runs. GOOOOO Evie!
The big excitement came though when I bowed out a bit early - my legs were tired and so I went to go hang out by the lodge while Nora joined Kathy and Kinsey for a few more runs. Nora had fun skiing by me and waving. At the very end of the day, I texted everyone that I was going to meet folks at the car and headed over there.
Problem is that the end of the green run splits off so that in one direction, you can go to the lodge while going in the other direction drops you off right into the main parking lot. For the last run, apparently, Nora headed towards the lodge while Kinsey headed towards the parking lot! Poor Kathy fell into a powder section after making a last minute turn to keep up with Nora. By the time she got back on her feet, she couldn't find Nora anywhere!
Thankfully, a good samaritan saw Nora alone and brought her into the lodge office and they called me. We have been practicing with Nora to memorize my phone number and our address in case of emergencies and it paid off! I rushed over to her and she was warm and smiley in the main office. She gave me a really really big hug though when she saw me. When you ask her about it now, she says she was scared but if she was, she didn't show it!
PHEW! There was a scary minute or two there but alls well that ends well. And it's a good reminder that we always pick a meeting place just in case of these situations.
At the beginning of the day
Four person chair lifts are fun!
Goofing around
Nora got stuck in the same powder spot that Kathy later fell into
Look how deep that is! Her skis are literally almost completed buried, standing straight up!
The next day, we headed back into the Mt Baker area and went cross country skiing. Since it was a lower elevation, the snow wasn't as great but more than enough for cross country skiing. Towards the end, it started to really snow hard - there were big fat flakes coming down and it was so pretty! It was a great way to end the weekend.
I had to do a quick trip to LA towards the end of July to say goodbye to my Uncle Pang, who passed away a few weeks earlier. I have fond memories of fun cousin time at his house in Palos Verdes and Uncle Pang taking us to the beach when we were younger. I remember how he delighted in making us kids squeal with laughter by pretending the car ride was a rolleroaster - we'd take sharp turns and all of us kids would slide to one side of his Volvo station wagon or he'd slow the car down to a roll and we'd all chant that we couldn't let the car stop and it would inch slowly forward at a stoplight. Although it was a sad reason to get together, I think he would be happy to know that the weekend was also a wonderful get together with family. Because it was fairly last minute, none of the kids flew over which meant us "adult cousins" were able to have long talks and linger over food. Kin and Meredith were able to host a summertime bbq at their house and we had a nice t
We got back from Japan about a week ago and we're still talking about what a great trip it was! Japan has never been super high on my places to visit but for a lot of reasons (I've never been, it's clean, it's safe, it's different) we took the plunge and booked it as our summer vacation this year. It helped that our friends, the Wongs, went last year, raved about it and loved it so much they were going again and we were able to coordinate so that some of our trip overlapped with theirs. It helped even more that the yen is at a 10-year low (maybe all time low?) against the dollar, which, aside from airfare, made everything quite affordable. Look how low the yen is! We lucked out that it kept falling after we booked our tix in Dec. Since this was our first big overseas trip since COVID and with kids (or, lets face it, SINCE kids), I dove into prepping for our trip - including trying to keep up my Duolingo streak of learning Japanese for at least a few minutes everyd
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Oh man, what a scary moment! Glad everything turned out ok. And kudos to everyone for keeping a level head.
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