Sitting in the airport

(I wrote this last Friday morning - tried to post then, but we had too much happening over the weekend, and then we were back to school on Monday. Sorry to be lame with a late post, but I haven't posted anything in so long...)

(We have more wonderful news - new posts coming soon - stay tuned!)

Hooray for PDX and free wi-fi! Mark and I are sitting here waiting for our plane. That would be waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Beautiful pinky-gold-purple clouds outside as the sun is coming up (6:15 am). (Why do we say "the sun is coming up"? Really the earth is spinning madly around toward the sun again...)

Anyway, we're on our way to go meet Ethan Haynie for the first time. Yesterday Hillary posted on her blog that he is in the 97th percentile. He already weighs almost as much as Maddy, and he's only one month old, she's 4 months old. So fascinating how individual all these little people are. Mark and I are excited to meet him. We're taking a Bumbo chair for a baby gift, which Mark is very kindly carrying onto the plane. He's such a good grandpa.

I haven't had a minute to post about our backpacking trip into Jefferson Park last week. It's not really a park, but it sure is gorgeous. It's in a wilderness area in the Willamette National Forest, right at the base of Mt. Hood. To get there, you drive to Salem, head east on Hwy 22 past Detroit Lake, then drive up a gravel road for 6 miles to the trailhead.

From the trailhead, it's a 6-mile hike to Jefferson Park. That would be 6 miles UPhill, but it's not really all that bad. The trail is well built and the grade is even and not too steep. Lots of shade, and the trail isn't too rocky. It was actually harder on us hiking out, DOWNhill, because all that downhill is kind of hard on our middle-aged knees and toes. (Our heads and shoulders did fine - ha!)

We hadn't been on a getaway, just for us, in years. Years and years. Maybe the last time was when we went to the coast in southern Washington on Labor Day of 1997. We've been on a number of road trips and other outings since then, but we're always with someone else, or headed to someone's house for a visit, or something. It was wonderful to have some time away to play all by ourselves. Twelve years in between is way too long.

My very cool blogging friend, Dorothy Jenson, recently posted a bunch of photos on her blog in the form of a slide show. She made it using her free PhotoBucket account, and I want to be cool like Dorothy, so I'm going to just save this little snippet and see if I can open up a PhotoBucket account of my own and upload some photos and make a slide show right here in PDX before our plane arrives...