Amanda is currently on call and it will be a long night for me as well, so let me take a break and recap some stuff. Piglet is currently taunting me by (surprise!) snoozing on the couch.
Amanda unexpectedly had some free time� unexpectedly in the sense that she gets no free time really and a free day is usually obtained without a lot of warning. Anyways, we went up to the Mount Baker area to do some hiking, check out the area, and to “get away”. Although we agreed that things are still pretty new here, so staying at home still feels like “getting away”.
I picked up two new hiking poles before taking off. Amanda had taken one to India and while it may not still be there it definitely has a new owner. I also picked up a new Camelbak bladder for Amanda as hers has a nasty habit of leaking. She says that it is “fine” but always gets annoyed and frustrated with it but the never does anything about it. Unfortunately, I spaced out and got the wrong size, so I will have to return it; I did not have the time before we left.
I picked up Amanda when she could finally escape work and we headed up to Glacier. I am not sure that Glacier is an actual town or not, but that is what the signs said. Its a pretty minute place. Glacier is around two hours drive north of Seattle normally, but we hit mega traffic leaving. It was pretty late, too, around 7pm or later. Traffic seems much worse north rather than south of Seattle.
Amanda was very hungry, so we stopped in Everett to get something to eat and to let the traffic thin out a bit. We ended up at this place called the Flying Pig Brewing Company. The food was alright. They serve those mass produced bread objects (cold!) which I find kinda lame in all but cheap diners, but our other food was fine. Their beer and mixed drinks looked quite interesting, but Amanda and I were pretty exhausted so no ethanol for us.
The atmosphere was pretty crazy. Apparently there was a fast pitch softball tournament or something going on, so the places was filled up with people with colorful tropical shirts on. Kids were running around, as were the adults, only slightly slower. It was also very very loud.
The service was quite good though. The waitress apologized for all the noise and said it was much different normally “except on hockey nights”. Amazing how good service can really change the perception of a dining experience, because otherwise it was pretty marginal with all the mayhem going on.
Eventually, we made it to our destination, a bed-and-breakfast. It has an entertaining driveway, which is really just a 3500 ft one lane road up a hill. I wondered what one should do if another vehicle came the other direction as you could not really move other on the narrow driveway, but that remained an academic problem. Amanda was happy that we parked by another Prius. Everyone was asleep, but we had made prior arrangements and received out keys from underneath the pig by the front door.
Our room was nice. I don’t know if the usually rent it out, though, as it seemed to be a living room/work area as it was quite large and had an office area with computer and was filled with their books. I believe the other rooms were more guest room like but are smaller. I think they are in process of converting it to a larger unit that can accommodate four or more people.
It seemed odd to not be camping out or sleeping in the car, but we did not have time to research such options thoroughly and prepare our camping gear and time is a pretty precious commodity.
Breakfast the next day was very nice. We had some very good granola with yogurt and blueberries and some egg and cheese thing. I am sure they would have kept feeding me until I was stuffed but there was hiking to be done. We talked a bit with the other guests before taking off.
Our first hiking option was dashed when we saw that the access road was closed down. A bridge had washed out. We went to the ranger station and figured an alternate hike.
The trailhead itself (“Artist Point”) was a big parking lot where many trails started. And many people may just drive up there to take in the views without hitting any of the trails as the lot was pretty high up. One had great views of Mount Shuksan and Mount Baker without going anywhere. There were also a lot of motorcyclists there who entertained themselves driving up the long windy road to the trailhead.
We did a hike called Ptarmigan Ridge. It was pretty tame as hikes go and there was not a lot of elevation change, but it was nice to be hiking. We had a lot of company in the beginning, but as usual the trail population drops dramatically the farther away one gets. The views were very nice and there was no uphill slog to get to them, although we both felt that is usually part of the experience. There were many wildflowers and volcanic ash(!) strewn about. We eventually hit a very snowy ridge that we decided not to try to ascend, so we stopped for quite a while and ate banana chips and bagels with cheese that we had brought.
As might be expected, Amanda’s Camelbak leaked, and she was unhappy with her wet butt.
The hike back, as always, was much faster than the hike in. We ate dinner at a place in Glacier called Milano’s which was quite good and reasonably priced. I was also impressed that their wine list listed normal prices for their wines so that you could see their markup. They did massively overcook the risotto I had as a side but it was tasty.
The drive back home was much faster, too. Maybe everyone was heading to Vancouver for the weekend or something.