2013: New Years Day Hike

I enjoyed three wonderful activities today to start off the New Year.

Adventures in home organization
I spent the morning puttering and organizing again. Mark helped, and we made so much progress!

 The former sewing nook now has all of our family history notebooks, etc. It's great to have a space for the photos of our great-grandparents again. They like to watch us keeping track of them.

Best of all, I now have my very own writing corner. The piano used to live here, but we hardly ever play it, so it now lives on the back porch. I considered putting my writing corner on the back porch, but it's cold back there. I love this spot. Spent about an hour working on my book today. I really like the sound of that last sentence.

Oh, why not...as long as I was in the organizing mood, I also cleaned up our office area. This is on the back porch. (Sure, doesn't everyone have a piano in their office / entry way?) I should have taken "before" pictures, so you would be suitably impressed with how tidy this is. Trust me that it was a mess. I recycled coupons and other outdated items that were over a year old.

Sort-of-annual New Years hike
After feeling quite virtuous from creating all these lovely, tidy areas in my home, it was time for the sort-of-annual New Years hike. It's only sort-of-annual because some years the weather stinks, or we're out of town, or we're not in the mood. Today was sunny, and we were ready to play, so we headed for an old favorite hike, the Horsetail Falls - Oneonta Falls Loop in the Columbia River Gorge.

We started the hike at Horsetail Falls. Yes, that is ice along the side of the falls. There was also ice on the road and sidewalk in front of the falls, where the wind was blowing the spray. Shortly after taking this photo, I slipped on the ice. Gravity works. I have a bruise on my hand from the fall, but I don't think I sprained anything this time.

About half-way through the hike. That's upper Horsetail Falls, also nicknamed Ponytail Falls, in the background. The trail goes behind the waterfall. Hmmm...did I mention that it was 33º and the wind was blowing? Brrr...we were a little nervous about the trail...would it be icy?

After all, we saw lots of ice during our hike. Fortunately, most of it was off the trail. Here's an example of the beautiful ice formations--we saw many of them--that resulted from water seeping and dripping off the basalt cliff faces.

Here's a view from behind Ponytail Falls. I'm standing on the trail, and the "cave" roof is over my head. (You can see more icicles that dripped through the cave roof.) Long story short, yes, the trail was pretty slick on the far side of the falls. Can you see the three people in the distance, making their way down the trail? They are just to the left of the waterfall, just below the edge of the cave roof. Yikes! We didn't want to slip and go sliding into that icy pond below the waterfall! We debated if we should turn around and head back, but we decided to take it slow and careful. Mark did a happy dance when we got past the 35 feet of icy trail!

 Crossing the bridge over Oneonta Falls.

 More ice formations. And my handsome fella.

 Almost back to the car - the tunnel at Oneonta Creek. By this time, we are walking the last 1/2 mile along the road, heading back to Horsetail Falls and the car.

This gorgeous tunnel was part of the original highway that was built in the 19-teens. We loved our outing, but by this time we were just plain cold and glad that we hadn't chosen a longer hike.

Time for a little window shopping
On the way home, we stopped at...

I still get kind of lost in there, but I've been several times now, so I can mostly find my way around. Mark and I had fun looking at all the different decorating ideas in the showroom.

Then I picked up several fun things with my Christmas-gift-money stash. So fun to splurge a little, and not feel guilty about the budget!

I hope you had a good first day of 2013, too.