Mazama-lama-ding-dong

You guys I totally went to the woods this weekend. Like there were mountains all around me, like right next to me, right there!, and trees, and quiet, and there might have been actual stars visible in the sky, which for a city dweller is muy exciting, although to be perfectly honest I didn't really see any. But still, it was the bonafide country. Outside the front door, it looked like this.



And outside my bedroom window, it looked like this.


True, we were in a nicely decked out house in the middle of all this nature, so let's not get crazy and think I was being all rustic or anything, but still. The place was so frickin' naturey it was bananas.


We drove three hours northeast of Seattle to get to this mythical place. There was a neighboring town about 20 miles away, so we weren't too far away from other people (and when I say other people, I must point out that nary a brown folk was to be found ANYWHERE, which can sometimes unsettle me, but this time it was ok. I tried to think of it like I was a unicorn or something, which isn't hard to do when people stare at you in the grocery store, because wouldn't you stare at a unicorn if you saw it in a grocery store?) Listen I know the unicorn thing is malarkey but I was trying to enjoy my weekend ok, so let me do whatever I need to do in my own mind to make that happen.

One more thing about the grocery store and town that was near to us. They love the old-timey saloon font there. All the signs, they are in the old-timey saloon font. It was so consistent that I wondered if it was like a town ordinance or something. Is that possible? To have font ordinances?

Anyway. I have discovered something new about myself and that is that I may have developed a teensy fear of heights. I have never had a fear of heights before that I can remember, but lately, if I am in a high building and look out the window, or on a mountain pass highway and look over the edge of the precipice, I feel sort of weird. And not my normal, everyday weird.

For instance, on the drive there, we stopped at this place where you could walk across a bridge for a nice lookout point over a gorge. The looking out over the gorge was fine, but the bridge itself was a grated bridge, where if you look down at your feet, you see the however-many-foot drop underneath you. That made me feel downright nervous. Granted, I think 90% of my nervousness was the fact that I had my iPhone with me and the thought started to go through my mind that I was going to drop it and it would fall through the grate and that would be the end of all happiness in my world. So maybe it's less a fear of heights and more a fear of iPhone-dropophobia.

Anyway, it was lots of prettiness. So much so that it moved me into singing the Grizzly Adams theme song into the echo of the mountainside. In its entirety. You know the song, right? "Deep inside the forest is a door into another land..." Sing it with me!


Yeah, Nordic Boy and Biogirl didn't join in either. But they let me sing the whole thing which is part of why I love them. Anyone that can stand my shit like that is worth a million bucks.

One more thing about the woods. The house we were staying in? Had no blinds, no curtains, no nothing. Which, I guess you don't need that when you don't have neighbors or people outside that can see in. You can change your skivvies in your bedroom in front of a window and no one but some peeping deer will see you. But to me? That just ain't right. I squirrelled myself away into the bathroom every time I had to change clothes. Which maybe just proves I am a bondafide city mouse, I don't know.

So for almost three days we hiked (and sort of got lost, but whatever, we made it back without having to decide which one of us was going to be dinner for the other two), we read, we sat in the sun, we talked, we grilled. BioGirl had a private love affair with her iPod which was a romantic thing to witness indeed, Nordic Boy grilled corn on the cob in his patented "char-broiled" manner (which to me, is just burned, but he defends the technique), and I soaked up the sun and heat to my heart's content.

The best thing for me about going on trips is that no matter how much fun I have, I have even more fun coming home. Who cares if that sounds Pollyanna-ish. That's how unicorns talk, you know.

Librarian Girl