Landry Academy Lewis River Hike

Brittany, the intensive teacher for Landry Academy, is in town this week to do a  chemistry intensive in Portland. We contacted her and discovered she was interested in seeing some of the sites in Washington. Naturally, we decided to take her, and her dog Marley, to hike the Lewis River Falls trail.

Although my pictures always look the same, it is just too gorgeous a sight not to take some more…

While the falls looked mostly the same, (a little more water than in the summer) the trail had changed quite a bit! We crossed the bright pink ribbon across the normal trail and found that the trail slid down the hill since September!

  you can see the trail on the other side of the slide in the trees

the trail is now at the bottom of the cliff in the river…

But this meant all new scenery on the new trail… and new signs, and new bridges… very nice!

We bypassed the trail to Middle Falls and went on to Upper Falls first…

    Upper Falls is the halfway point of the hike and a terrific place to rest and have a bite to eat at the base of the falls!

a lot of logs washed up on the beach over the winter

Brittany & Marley

It started to get a bit late, so we headed back up river to Middle Falls…

I am so glad they improved this part of the trail! It used to be a nasty corner!

The views of the new section of trail are even prettier going back!

I’m already looking forward to going back and showing them off to someone new! And I hope to one day camp at the trailhead campground!!! (hint hint…)         

Birthday Food Tour

For my birthday this year, we took a culinary tour of the Philippines, Hawaii, India, Japan and France…

First stop: The Philippine Market in Beaverton for lunch. Maggie, the sweet owner/cook, told us exactly what to order from her tiny little place (sort of looked like a dive) and we had no choice but to obey.

First thing we did was grad a couple of drinks from the fridge…

We liked them both!

Appetizer: lumpia. They were delicious!

Then it was pancit and pork adobo… Mmmmm!

Everything was freshly made and piping hot and the entire time Maggie was asking if everything was ok.

We knew it was probably good because everyone else there having lunch was Filipino.

After completely stuffing ourselves, we struck up a conversation with a gentleman who had retired from the US Army and was talking about his grandkids, fishing, and going back. But they won’t issue him a visa because he was in the Army.

Then Maggie realized we needed dessert. She called it Filipino shaved ice or halo halo. What it really was was crushed ice, evaporated milk, coconut gels, gels of various colors & shapes, pounded young rice, boiled sweet beans and purple yam ice cream. We were given a large bowl, two spoons and the directions to keep stirring as we ate…

I was super proud of my husband for eating any of this at all! :)

Maggie told us that her husband was going to Manila for 7 months to build them a house for their retirement. She was so excited about her home that she wrote down her name and contact info so that we could contact her and let her husband show us all over the Philippines when we visited there! Maybe she knows something we don’t??? Thanks to our previous conversation with the retired fisherman, we also knew the best route and airlines to take on our trip… LOL

I loved how excited and proud they were of their country and how much they wanted us to go and see it someday!

Our next stop was the Indian Supermarket…

It was a good thing I was so full from lunch or I would have spent a fortune!

After running a few errands in Vancouver, it was time to eat again and thankfully Patrick’s Hawaiian Cafe was just down the road. The food was fantastic! We didn’t have Kalua pork that good in Hawaii! We will go back…

After all that good food and time with my sweet hubby, we went home to open presents and enjoy some sweets from France and Japan… :)