My longtime friend Rachel from my years at Bowdoin visited Emily and I this week before a conference was attending at Skamania Lodge. We picked her up from the airport on Tuesday night and had a wonderful evening catching up with her in our backyard over dinner. She seems to have a wonderful job on the Hawaiian island of Lanai and we were deleted to be invited to visit them whenever we’d like. While chatting a big fat raccoon ran along the top of our fence delighting Rachel who doesn’t get to see mainland wildlife often and perking the interest of Leo who watched it intently!
On Wednesday after a belgian waffle breakfast we headed out towards Mount Saint Helens which she hadn’t seen before. Thankfully, the volcano stayed cloud-free for us while we were there. We checked out the Johnston Ridge Observatory, watched the extremely outdated movie inside and went for a short hike before heading home to have dinner with Emily at our favorite Oregon Public House just down the street.
It was pouring rain on Thursday unfortunately, but that didn’t stop us from heading down the Old Historic Columbia Highway towards Hood River. We stopped briefly at the Vista House and then for a short hike at Latourell Falls with Leo. In Hood River we got lunch at the pFriem brewery in Hood River along the shore of the Columbia before I dropped Rachel off at Skamania just in time for her first meeting. It was great to catch up with her for a couple days and Emily and I will do our best to try to visit her and Jon sometime on Lanai.