Saturday, January 09, 2010

Where to Begin! Merry New Happy Year!


Here are the Women of our family, Kaleigh, Sonia, Maddie, Annette and moi


Beautiful rings that Loriann fashioned for each of us gals, from a set of araura borealis earrings of grandma Shumeys. Thank-you Lori for your amazing talent and thoughtfullness. It will be a nice memory of Annie, and she would of liked that.



Sonia, Kaleigh, and Maddie in hair camo




Emil and Sonia attack the yummy turkey and get it cut up for dinner! T'was a tasty organic bird and we ate it most of all it including a big pot of turkey soup! Yum! Thank-you Sonia for cooking up a storm for what might of been our last big dinner together as a family, in long time.


We were trying for family photo and this is about "take 13!"




Yea! We are back home after a delightful and adventuresome holiday to the USA after our beautiful Christmas with Sonia and Annette and Kaleigh and Madeline. Lets see, where did I leave off... We were in Victoria having Christmas with the girls and helping with the packing a bit before Annette left to Halifax for her new life there. We took everyone out on our last night for a yummy dinner at Red Robins. How can you go wrong.. a big stack of onion rings for starters and then everyone dug into their various burgers and indulged until we could hold no more! It was good to be there, just with us enjoying ourselves as a family and chatting about anything and everything.



Annette was all packed up by the movers on the 30th and on the morning of the 31st, Emil and I had reservations on the COHO, a huge ship that ferries 100 cars at a time across the Juan De Fuca Straight to Port Angeles...directly across from Victoria. It takes 1 and a half hours to make the trip and you do it mostly sitting down as the ship heaves from side to side as it hauls itself over the huge waves. Made me think I might not be one for a cruise!


We stopped for lunch in Port Angeles before carrying on south to Astoria. The highway wiggly winds itself along the west side of Puget Sound the Hood Canal. Primarily, it looks like summer resorts along the way, small fishing villages and a smattering of taverns in between. The nice feature of that trip is that it is dotted with state parks along the ocean that have picnic tables and clean washrooms, so no lack of facilities as you make your way south. It took about 5 and a half hours to reach Astoria from Port Angeles. We drove the last leg of the trip from just beyond Longview/Kelso to Astoria, in the dark.


That was ok...no rain, no snow! We didn't hestitate to return to our old haunt, The Lamplighter motel...right next to the Pig and the Pancake restaurant...We didn't have Silky with us, but they do take dogs and it seemed that pretty much all of the hotels and Motels do. In fact, we saw more dogs than ever on the beach at Canon beach, and the Surfside hotel caters to them with offerings of dog basket, water dishes, towels and treats.... I didn't check the cost, but I am sure it was quite do-able as many mnay folk staying there had a dog.



I'll post some pics now and then probably go to bed and continue more tomorrow.
I took over 400 pics, so I won't try to show them all at once. The photo up top is of Haystack rock in Canon beach...a landmark as old as time, itself!















"The Creator"