America 2015 - part 11

Deception Falls has an intriguing name, and none of the signs explained it.






















The deep water had a green hue, it was so inviting.



Home again after the family road trip, I caught this new-to-me species in the yard. What a cute little guy, he was very shy and I couldn't get near him.



I LOVE air conditioning. Check out the difference between indoors and outdoors. If my mom sees this photo, she's gonna kill me for turning the AC down so low, but I was sick of being too hot.







I found an old photo album from the 90s and this picture was my birthday - my sister got me this cake as a joke - I had no dog. I remember trying to look sad for the photo.



Then I found these wonderful pictures of our Orienteering group's fun day at the beach. My parents surprised us by showing up and taking these photos. What a surprise it was to see them at Ocean Shores unexpectedly!

I love my mare, she hated the ocean but she's such a good girl she dealt with it. Baasha went right in his first time seeing the big waves, no problem. He seems to be squinting in the sun in these photos.







I guess I'd forgotten my sister did Klickitat Trek! That's not my sweatshirt she's wearing. (Oh, and back home, I found my one and only BC award from Klickitat, a gorgeous iron clock in the form of a mountain with an endurance horse scrambling up it. That clock is too precious to put on an airplane to Germany.)



Here we are at the start of some sort of competition - I remember we played capture the flag and one lady's horse got dizzy in the waves and fell down with her. You must look up when the waves retract, I felt Baasha get unsteady too.



Oh awesome, they got a photo of my first truck and my old trailer. I remember I got it stuck stuck in the sand cuz I stopped to talk to someone, and had to be towed out by a friend. That truck is huge to Germans, but in reality it wasn't quite suited to pulling a heavy trailer like my first one.







We did puzzles a lot at my parents' house (Amy F Fowler, "It's like having a thousand friends!").



It was difficult to do our traditional oyster grilling this year due to red tide and restrictions on local seafood, but my parents finally found some oysters for us. I know it sounds awful to most people, but fresh oysters from a local coast on the grill are awesome when dipped in the hot butter/garlic/lemon juice sauce I made alongside.



It's not Summer in Seattle for me without grilled oysters.



Little hummer.



Seattle could have used a little flooding.



This ingenious thing is actually a "Little Free Library" - what we kept discovering all over Washington. You borrow a book and leave a book if you like. Lots of them have geocaches in them. My husband is wearing shorts? It must have been very, very hot out.



I ate so many of these while geocaching, and picked enough with my mom for her to bake a blackberry cobbler.



Another Little Free Library, on someone's home.











I had to get a photo of this because it's such an American thing to hire someone to stand on a corner with a sign and flip it all around. Hm, gas was 3.13? So cheap compared to Germany!



I liked this sign - you can buy weed here, but please go home before you smoke it.




Finally we met up with my two horse friends that I used to do endurance with, but mostly Orienteering cuz we were a team. "Best of the Last" was our name. In this photo my friend Barb pokes her head from behind a log. She was the one who leased me the mare all those years. These two friends of mine actually came to Germany to visit me, and that doesn't happen often. They've become avid geocachers (Barb has over 10,000 caches, almost more than anyone on earth), so this day we spent geocaching and catching up on our horsey lives.

When I said how I don't really want to ride anymore, they both acted as if I had an illness that I must recover from - they were sort of devastated, like Lytha is not Lytha anymore. They both said I absolutely must sell the horse that made me not want to ride anymore. They have both done it, and told me it's no big deal, you just find the one you love and go have fun again.

It was an awesome day with my old buddies, we cracked each other up as we did so long ago. It made me tremendously homesick though, being with them. The one who took the photo, Brandi, she was kind enough to make an appointment for me because her husband (who crewed for us long ago) is an eye doctor and I really needed a good eye exam. Well, I got one, complete with photos of my retinas, which is new to me. I was so thankful to them, and so wistful that I'd be on a plane soon far away, I wish I could have had more time.




Since my parents live so close to Sea Tac, I couldn't help but get a photo of a plane landing. To my shame this is the first time I'd noticed that the planes change their landing/takeoff direction based on the wind direction. They must take off into the wind, so I kept track of south or nothbound landings the entire time we were there. How could I have never noticed that?

Next: Cle Elum, Roslyn's Northern Exposure sites, Leavenworth, and home?