I'm back!

I've been relying on Val's site to be our primary source of information for the last few months, work has been hectic and it seems like we've been picking an Australian up from the airport every other week since August. Ross T and Dirk are both settling into Seattle well, and with Jodie joining Ross in about 3 weeks, and another friend from Perth starting at Microsoft in January, the colony is ever expanding.

Val and I are really excited to have Jo visit us in a few weeks, we've got a few things planned, but primarily we want to take her to do a lot of this....

We headed up to Mt. Baker for the first weekend of the ski season last Saturday and were lucky enough to have great conditions. There were a lot of people we know up there, we took up Dirk (for his first time snowboarding) and Ross and met up with Jacob and a couple of his housemates.

Dirk was a great sport, we left him to take a lesson and found him later in the day making his way down the hill with brief periods of what looked like snowboarding interspersed with periods of falling flat on his face (or arse, or back).


Exhibit A


The weather was great and they had about 8" of snow overnight, so the snow was really nice too. It was a lot of fun to be on the mountain with all the Australians, we've all got season passes to Snoqualmie (much closer to Seattle, but not really open yet) so there's going to be a lot more to come :)




Dirk, Me, Jacob, Ross T




Val and I



You can see the rest of the photos here

Yosemite!

Val and I have been very busy over the last few weeks. Dirk came out for a week or so and saw Seattle and San Francisco, hopefully we'll be seeing him again soon. While he was out, we went on an awesome hike of Mt. Townsend. Nothing like the one Val went on to the exact same place the week before. Val's mum was also out for a week, and they headed to Mt St. Helens and Victoria, Canada. Val has a lot of photos up on her website.

We're heading out of town for about 9 days - flying to Reno then camping in Tahoe and Yosemite National park. We'll be taking plenty of photos so keep your eye on this space and Val's site for updates...

Photo Album

We've been doing a lot of hiking recently and I've been uploading the pictures to a public gallery here.

The latest addition is Rachel Lake, where we hiked yesterday.

I'm terribly lazy

My updates have become more and more sporadic on this blog, I've been relying on Val to keep people informed of our comings and goings, she's been putting a lot of photos up since we went to Australia.

Everything is going well in Seattle, work is good for both of us, and the weather is sort of almost getting warm. Warm enough to get outside at least which has been good. We've managed to get out hiking/camping most weekends for the last month or two (except when I've been on-call), and have some pretty nice photos to show for it. We've been on some nice long hikes, I've put some photos below of a recent 12km round-trip we did with about 800m of elevation gain. We started out in warm sunshine, and by the time we'd reached the lake we were walking through snow, and found the lake with ice still floating on the surface. That said, the air temperature was probably just below 20C.

Us starting out on the Annette Lake hike.



Val bathed in sunlight and pollen



Ubiquitous slow shutterspeed water shot



Log bridge



Val in the snow



Lake Annette under snow and ice



Very, very clean water



This was a great hike, a good workout and the route was quite picturesque. The lake itself was small but a nice spot to sit and have lunch. The water was really clean, and absolutely freezing - I took my shoes off and walked in a short way, that didn't last long. While we were having lunch a thunderstorm rolled in pretty quickly so we made tracks and managed to get down the mountain in under two hours without getting wet.

Australia

Val and I have returned to the US after a three week trip home, which was fantastic. I want to thank everyone who put us up (especially Luke and Fi, you guys have to come and make use of our spare room!) and showed us a good time, our trip really highlighted how good we have it in Perth and what a great (if quiet) place it can be.

We generally had a pretty cruisy time, went to the beach almost every day, got in some surfing and diving, drank some little creatures and had a lot of barbecues.

Thanks Australia :)

Cottesloe Beach


Val has far more photos, videos etc up on her website.

Skiing!

This winter is shaping up better than last for Seattle's skiiers, when we arrived in March, all the snow had melted and it wasn't coming back. Most resorts ended up only being open for a couple of weeks last season, and as such most are giving last season's season pass holders a free pass for this year.

The snow has arrived early and in abundance at a couple of the resorts near here, we took the opportunity to head to Crystal on Sunday with a few friends, it was a nice day out.

Janice and Val


The group we went with were all pretty relaxed and mainly interested in taking a gentle start to the season, it quickly became apparent that not having to sit down and strap in each time you get off the chairlift separates the skiiers from the snowboarders, and we lost various members of the party on more than one occasion.



I wear a helmet because I fall down a lot



Edgar, Janice, Jenny, Jason, Val, Ross



Having lunch..


I was surprised at the number of people who spent the afternoon watching football on TV after paying pretty exorbitant prices for lift passes. For the price of the lift pass, they could have saved a 2 hour drive from Seattle and gone to the game.




Caught with my pants down


Jason caught me changing in the front of his truck. He just got down to his boxers and bare feet in the parking lot (which had a good inch or two of ice coating it) to get changed. He grew up in Alaska and I think the cold broke a small part of his brain.


I tried to get artistic


Crystal ended up getting a further 18 inches of snow the day after we went, but the conditions were still pretty nice while we were there :)

Still alive

After some prompting from someone who wanted to know if I was actually still alive, I felt I should put a brief message up. I am alive. Val and I booked our flights to Australia last night, we're flying in to Perth at about 1pm on the 16th of January, and flying out again at 1am on the 4th of February.

We're heading out skiing on Sunday, I'll get some photos while we're out and post them next week.

Take care all.