2022 in Review

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We did a lot in 2022, from traveling to attending weddings to seeing friends. These photos from the year aren’t from one of our large trips, but they encompass more of what made the year special overall.

One of the best views of Seattle is from the Bainbridge ferry (photo/Jason Rafal)

We spent most of the spring in the Seattle area, where we hiked and enjoyed the views as the days got longer.

In March, we got together with Jason’s family for the GOES-T launch in Cocoa Beach. Between the launch, visiting the Kennedy Space Center, and spending time at the beach, we all enjoyed ourselves. Jason rented a big lens just for the occasion.

Since we were on the East Coast anyway, we flew up to Virginia to spend some time with Jason’s family and visit a whole lot of baby animals. I always love an excuse to cuddle with baby goats.

In August, we went to a wedding at Lake Tahoe. I had never been and was really excited, and it didn’t disappoint. There were parts of the area that felt surprisingly similar to Colorado, but the giant, beautiful lake is really one of a kind. We’d love to go back.

Jason took lots of beautiful pictures of plants and flowers over the year.

Jason also took a lot of photos of animals, from pets to wild birds (he’s getting increasingly into birding).

We spent some time in the summer camping, hiking, and exploring. It was nice to see friends and get the Jeep dirty.

We also got a little drone, and we took some pretty shots from above our house.

Our house is near the Seattle Zoo, so we got memberships to add it to our walking options around our place. Jason enjoyed practicing his wildlife photography, particularly once the birds were let out again after the avian flu quarantine.

As always, Seattle is beautiful and we feel lucky to live here. We’ll see where 2023 takes us.

Sailors at sunset from Golden Gardens park (photo/Jason Rafal)

2021 in Review

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In 2021, we tried to balance a lot of outdoor time with finally getting to see people in person. We moved out of our downtown apartment and bought a townhouse, and we spent a lot of time exploring our new neighborhood as well. We miss the view from our apartment, but I’m really enjoying having a private door to the outside. The pandemic has continued to be rough in many ways, but we’ve been very lucky to keep having new experiences in our adopted PNW home.

Something I have really learned to appreciate in Seattle is sunlight in January. It’s rare, but when it does happen, the low angle of the light is always beautiful, no matter what time of day. It’s almost special enough to make all of the gray days worth it.

In the spring, we spent some time playing in the snow, which I still miss from living in Colorado. Seattle stays pretty snow-free in the winter, but the snowy mountains are just a couple of hours away.

Spring also brought a lot of beautiful flowers.

Jason found many small creatures to take pictures of.

Our first camping trip of the year was at the end of a washed out forest service road, and it had an amazing view. The Jeep has opened up a lot of dispersed camping options for us, and we love it.

One of my favorite campsites

The summer was full of beautiful landscapes.

For my birthday weekend we met friends at a cabin near Mt. Adams, where we stared at the views of the mountain at every single time of day.

A selection of water pictures from the summer - waterfalls, streams, and rivers.

In the fall, Jason had a short work trip to New York. It was wonderful to be able to walk around the city and eat all the amazing food.

Jason had a weekend trip with friends to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree, where he took a lot of pictures of spiky plants.

Washington is, as always, full of tiny, fascinating plants and animals.

Since we live four blocks from the zoo, we decided we had to go see the animals.

This is a somewhat random collection of photos from around town over the year.

And then some random photos from day and weekend trips.

We ended the year in Astoria with this view of a tree and a cat.

Off to the Islands

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At the start of the year, when we weren’t sure what covid would look like by mid-year and whether we’d be vaccinated, we booked a 4th of July trip to Orcas Island as an excursion that would be fairly local but also pretty different from our normal lives. Even when we were able to get vaccinated in April and May, we were excited to spend some time in the islands.

Orcas Island is the largest of the San Juan islands, which are near the Canadian border and are just as close to Vancouver Island as the Washington mainland. The trip from Seattle involves an hour and a half drive and then an hour ferry ride, so it feels like a fairly significant trip. Orcas is known for its beauty and plethora of outdoor recreation opportunities. We stayed in the little town of Eastsound, where we could walk to restaurants and also enjoy water views.

A ridiculously beautiful potato dish (photo/Jason Rafal)

Dinner on a beautiful patio (photo/Jason Rafal)

Our first non-food activity was the one I was most unsure whether I wanted to do - a biplane ride. A husband and wife team run a small business taking people on flights in a 1927 biplane, and when Jason said he wanted to go, I decided I would probably be able to get through it without throwing up.

Our plane (which was a whole 5 years newer than the stamp claimed) (photo/Jason Rafal)

After receiving our safety briefing, life jackets, ear plugs, caps, and goggles, we climbed into the plane. We just barely fit in the side by side seat in the front (it was made for much smaller people), and our pilot sat in the seat behind us. Climbing into the plane did not raise my confidence - at first glance, it looks flimsy at best and hazardous at worst. It’s all delicate wings and small sticks tied together. As soon as we took off, though, I felt immediately better. The plane is loud, since it’s not a closed cockpit, but it’s so light that ascending felt effortless. 

The view from the air (photo/Jason Rafal)

We saw dozens of sailboats hanging out in coves (photo/Jason Rafal)

A view of the terrifying plane wings in the evening light (photo/Jason Rafal)

For an hour, we flew around the islands, flying to the top of Mount Constitution at 2400 feet elevation before dropping down to almost skim the water. It was exceptionally fun, even as I kept turning sideways to give Jason a little more room to take pictures.

A peek of the Mount Constitution tower (photo/Jason Rafal)

Mount Constitution with the San Juan Islands in the distance (photo/Jason Rafal)

Flying low around an island (photo/Jason Rafal)

Circling while waiting for our turn to land (photo/Jason Rafal)

The next day, we drove to the top of Mount Constitution to take in the sights. The mountain is in Moran State Park, which has lovely forests, lakes, and views of the islands. The top of the mountain has a weird medieval-style tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 30s, which is visually confusing but gets you up a little higher to see the views. We could see Mount Baker in the distance on the mainland, as well as some of the Cascades and a tiny bit of Mount Rainier. 

In my happy place: on top of a mountain (photo/Jason Rafal)

Mount Baker on the mainland (photo/Jason Rafal)

A rather flustered bird (photo/Jason Rafal)

From the top of the mountain, we took a hike before heading to Buck Bay Shellfish Farm for lunch. This restaurant came highly recommended, and for good reason - it’s casual, has lovely outdoor seating, and the food is great. 

After lunch we headed back to the park to paddle board on one of the lakes, where we alternated between laying in the sun and doing some strenuous paddling against the wind. 

Jason floats in the sun (photo/Nicole Harrison)

Jason floats in the sun (photo/Nicole Harrison)

On Sunday we hiked in Turtleback Mountain Preserve on the other side of the island, which had similarly great views of San Juan Island and Canada, and then spent the rest of the day hanging out and browsing the shops in Eastsound.

Some very green marsh scum (photo/Jason Rafal)

We joined the handful of people at Orcas Knob (photo/Jason Rafal)

Foxgloves on the trail (photo/Jason Rafal)

The north beaches of Orcas have exceptional sunsets, so we headed over there at about 9:00 each night to take in the views. There’s no large public beach, but there are a couple of small chunks of coast where we could sit with our fellow sunset seekers and take in the view. 

Taking in the colors (photo/Jason Rafal)

The sun touches the horizon on a clear evening (photo/Jason Rafal)

The waves created by boats made a lovely texture contrast (photo/Jason Rafal)

A cloudier evening (photo/Jason Rafal)

It was a wonderful long weekend, only slightly soured by the cancelation of a ferry that resulted in us waiting for about 4 hours to board the next one. I suppose that’s island life.

A well-named boat (photo/Jason Rafal)

2019 in Review

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2019 was a crazy year for us. We sold our house, moved across the country, got new jobs, missed a vacation due to some awful travel luck, explored a new state, took a surprise trip to Paris a week before our planned Asia vacation, managed to make it back to Colorado for the grand opening of our friends’ distillery, spent Thanksgiving with Jason’s family on the East Coast, and ended the year with a family trip to Morocco and Lisbon. Eight states, eight countries, four continents. An absurd number of travel issues and wonderful new experiences.

We blogged our trips to Canada, Paris, Asia, and Morocco separately, but we also did a ton of exploring in Oregon and Washington, and we wanted to share some of what we experienced outside of our big international trips.

There are a lot of pictures in this blog, so I decided to really push the limit of our new CMS and just create more carousels than should ever be on one page. Please enjoy a snapshot of our first year in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ll start with some photos from our apartment. We love our apartment view, which looks out over Capitol Hill and First Hill. It’s beautiful at all times of day and all times of year. I’ve also included a few pictures from our apartment building’s 41st story rooftop, which has a lovely view of the Space Needle and sound.

The Center for Wooden Boats is a very cool society that gives free boat rides on Lake Union on Sunday mornings. If you’re willing to wait in line to sign up, it’s a great way to get out on the water. We got to hang out on a sailboat with a volunteer who told us about the radioactive tomatoes that grew in Gas Works Park when he was a kid.

In April, we decided to go to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, which is north of Seattle. In order to avoid the rather intense crowds and traffic, we got up absurdly early and got there for sunrise, where we hung out in the fields and took pictures with a handful of other photographers.

In early June, we started out a month of family visits by heading to Astoria to see Nicole’s family. We hung out with friendly cats, hiked through the woods, and took in the views from the Astoria Column.

A few days after we got back from Astoria, Jason’s parents came to visit us in Seattle. While they were here, we did a day trip out on the water to look for whales. We learned a lot about Orcas, transient and resident, and saw a lot of other birds and wildlife as well.

For Pride weekend, our friend Sage came to visit us. Along with partying way too hard, we also went to Whidbey Island and visited some of Sage’s favorite places from when his grandparents lived there.

Seattle has some wonderful parks. These pictures are from Gas Works Park and the Japanese Garden.

At one point during the summer, we spent a weekend on Whidbey Island. We stayed in a cabin in the woods, hiked along the shore, and hung out with some very old trees. It was a good weekend.

I know this may be hard to believe, but I am running out of categorizations. So, here we have A Brief Study in Seattle Architecture.

Emilie and Ally came to visit us in August, and we went to Olympic National Park for a couple of days. It was incredibly stunning - it was a gorgeous weekend, and we had a pretty crazy cloud inversion when we were on Hurricane Ridge. We also did a short but exceptionally difficult hike overlooking Lake Crescent. On our way home, we stopped at a beach to enjoy the sun. The Olympic Peninsula is a pretty incredible place.

We went on quite a few hikes over the summer. They ranged from incredibly rainy to sunny and clear, but they were all incredibly green and beautiful. Goat Lake was one of my favorites.

In October, we met a few friends out by Levenworth, WA for a weekend. Levenworth is a very odd place - it’s a Bavarian themed village, a concept thought up by the University of Washington as a response to the town’s concern about staying financially afloat. Oktoberfest in Levenworth is, of course, a huge thing, and the weekended ended up being a fun combination of outdoor adventuring and tipsy people watching.

We spent a lot of time walking around Seattle with friends, going to parades, drinking coffee, reviewing local art, and everything in between. This collection is an assortment of photos from those random outings.

In November, we went to Astoria to see Nicole’s sister and dad, and our friend Megan met us out there as well. We went to Youngs River Falls, which still had some beautiful fall colors.

In December, we visited Cannon Beach for the first time with Megan and her incredibly fluffy dog, Albus. The Oregon coast is amazingly beautiful, and we had a lovely sunny, misty day on the beach. We also hung out in Astoria again, where we visited the Maritime Museum (this attraction comes highly recommended, and we agree completely).

To finish the 2019 set, here are some of the adorable dogs around Seattle that we were able to see and spend time with. Seattle has some great dog parks and dog events, and we were able to be brief, vicarious dog owners with friends and strangers.