Father-Sons Mountain fishing trip...

Wally and his three sons are off on an adventure to high in the Montana mountains near Red Lodge. These pictures were taken last year when I was there with Wally (and my brother John and his girlfriend Laurie) - and I'm posting them so my sweet daughter-in-laws can get a picture of where our men are today! In the picture above is a view of the "road" - it's about 6 1/2 miles from the base to the top of the plateau and they will be driving slowly...slowly... over a rough gravel road to get to the top. It took us an hour to get to the top.

Then, we they arrive they will hike, with their tents and fishing poles, to some of the beautiful mountain lakes. You can see a lake down in the distance here. Hopefully they will find one where the fish are biting!!

The view is spectacular from the top of the plateau - but it is also quite barren. I'm sure they are having a great time together! I wonder how many times they will be saying to each "oh, man, it's a good thing mom isn't here" - whenever they do something they know I would deem rather ... risky! But I bet by the end of the trip they will be saying... after cleaning up after themselves... "oh, man, too bad mom isn't here!!"

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my peace and quiet...

A year goes by fast!

A year ago a new little boy joined the A's..

And he's ready to party!!

Happy Birthday Josiah!!

The Driveway Project

Tea time on the deck....

It's been quite a while since I enjoyed a nice tea party - especially with my grand daughter, Brooklyn. She came to grandma's last night and slept over night and today we had fun having a tea party, baking cookies and... playing with my old dolls! (Even my sons never had that privilege!) I don't know who had more fun, Brooklyn or me!!

First we had to pick fresh flowers. We set the table up on the deck with our lace tablecloth and fancy tea set. Brooklyn took this picture. We decided (Brooklyn decided) we would not wear hats. bummer.

Notice the cute jelly sandwiches. Most popular are the little tongs for lifting the sugar cubes. (Wait, the sugar cubes themselves are "most popular.")

We started with tea but we didn't really like it - it was a raspberry tea that was too sweet. So we switched to orange juice and it was just right.

Brooklyn poured carefully. There's a lot to learn to being a lady!!

We've done lots of baking in this corner...

This is the baking corner of my kitchen - and Brooklyn enjoyed baking cookies today at grandma's.

Here are a few pictures from the previous years of her in the "baking corner"...

This was the fall of 2006.

Making Christmas pretzels in 2006...

She was really young here and learning how to apply those fun sprinkles!

Here she is having fun making the fork marks on the peanut butter cookies. In her undies!

Grandma's dolls!

On to the next project...

For quite some time Wally has talked about redoing the driveway. It is a big project but today seems to be the day... good bye to the old asphalt. It will be replaced with concrete. It may take a while to get the whole driveway poured (a few days, likely) but it will sure be a wonderful improvement! What a hard working guy!


Hauling it away - I think it was about 10 loads they had to haul away.

Hail the lowly chokecherry....

Many thanks to my sister-in-law Martha for picking some chokecherries for us while we were in Alaska. They are small dark berries that are not good at all to eat unless you turn them into chokecherry syrup! Wow, with the addition of sugar (I won't tell you how much..) it makes the most wonderful syrup for pancakes and waffles! I'm not all that fond of the canning work, but I did get a nice 1/2 dozen pint jars. Delicious!

My own personal labels generated from my computer. I think they are cute.

A quick picture of some recent garden produce. The cherry tomatoes are especially tasty!

How to enjoy a sunny Sunday...

It was a perfect day to get the pontoon on the lake. I hate to admit this but this was the first day this summer that we did so! It was warm, sunny and relaxing.

We weren't the only ones enjoying this beautiful day. Can you see Mr. Bald Eagle up there soaring around? We saw some in Alaska but how great to see the ones that share our town! The next picture shows him up close..

Ah, a great day to soar!

More wide views

Here are a few more wide pictures from my camera using "stitch a picture". The first two are taken while we were on our ATV ride adventure near Copper River, Alaska. You really have to double click on them to get the full benefit. There are mountains in the distance in the top picture.
This was the view of the river - and we rode down quite a fun trail to reach the river.

This is NOT Alaska. I took this last year but never had it merged into this long picture. Do you know where it is??

Stitch a picture

My camera has this feature for taking a wide landscape photo called "stitch a picture". I finally figured out how to get it into a full picture. Here is the Harvard glacier. I think you probably need to double click on it to enlarge it and get the feeling for the width. The glacier is 3 1/2 miles wide!

Wet and wild

This was so much fun and much better then I expected! We signed up for a river adventure - not a very rough one, but the guide could see the men (Wally, Dan and Richard) were really game for some rougher water and, I think, he realized that Denise and I were not as wimpy as we looked.... so he guided us into some great spashes! What a riot! We were all bundled up in some awkward wet suits (and, of course, our life jackets). It was tons of fun. (The two people in the back of the boat were folks we didn't know.) We rafted about 12 miles down the Nenana River near Denali and enjoyed some fresh early morning air and clear skies. Very picturesque but it wasn't prudent to bring our good cameras! Dan and Denise each brought a disposable camera that can get wet, so I hope we got a few good pictures from them. I wish we had done this kind of thing when our sons were boys. It would have been a great memory! Sorry guys...

Wildlife at Denali

At 6 a.m. we boarded a bus to spend 8 hours driving into Denali National Park looking for wildlife and other views. (You have to go via an official denali bus as they tightly control any cars going into the park. I think we saw one car.) It was an overcast wet day so we did not see the blue sky and majestic mountains that we hoped to photograph. However we did see wildlife. You might need to double click on the pictures... the above picture is a moose with a HUGH rack.

This was one large eagle.


Can you spot the caribou?

The most interesting and exciting were the many sightings of grizzly bears. This one was mama bear and her cubs. We watched them for quite some time (sitting in the safety of the bus, of course!). Mama bear was digging for something and I loved the little cub trying to do something in that bush. Like Winnie the Pooh looking for honey?

Okay, don't just think this is a boring picture - double click it to see the flock of dall sheep. Did you find them?

First formal night

Here we are on our first formal night. This vacation had a little bit of everything - fancy and rugged.

Dinner at the Savoy restaurant

Richard & Denise

Paul & JoAnn

Dean & Deb

Howard & Dan

(Dan's wife Pam had to cancel at the last minute due to her father's grave illness. Sadly, he passed away. Pam, we missed you but were glad that you were with your dad and family.)

Formal night, fancy ship

There were two evenings on the ship that were designated formal. Here we are posing for a picture on the beautiful staircase.

There are two panoramic elevators that were quite dramatic. The area was open for about 3 floors - the elevators, a fancy staircase and some upscale shops on each floor.

Another view

Looking down