Wife on the Farm

Anniversary at the Coast

Our fourth wedding anniversary was last Thursday, so the farmer and I packed our bags and headed to the coast last Sunday.  We stayed at the Inn at Spanish Head in Lincoln City, because we weren't sure where we wanted to hike this year, and Lincoln City is a good starting point to explore either north or south.  We reserved a room with a kitchen, which is wonderful for brewing up a cup of hot cocoa right after my feet hit the floor in the morning.

We decided to take a small hike before checking in, so we headed north and stopped at Neskowin.  It's a tiny little town, but we thought we'd hike along the beach starting at Proposal Rock, a large rock where it's said that many a guy has popped the question over the years.  We started walking north and didn't stop until we arrived at a stream just south of Winema Beach.  The round-trip hike was about 5.5 miles.  So much for starting out slowly.  The farmer can hike, I tell you.  After forcing our (my) tired legs back to the car, we grabbed some champagne, beer and sandwiches and enjoyed a quiet dinner back in our room.

On Monday, we decided to take an even longer hike.  We started at the West Winds campground at Sand Lake, trudged through the soft sand to the beach and then turned northward and hiked all the way to the base of Cape Lookout.  It's a 3.5 mile hike each way.  We grabbed some pop and ice cream on our way out and then got the bright idea on our drive home to take up where we left off on Sunday, so we drove south to Winema Camp and walked out to the beach and hiked southward a half-mile till we reached the stream where we stopped the day before.  Just because we didn't want to leave a little piece of beach un-hiked, I guess.  My old tired legs said "no more" so we headed back to the room and ordered up a romantic anniversary seafood dinner and were blessed with one of the most gorgeous sunsets we've ever seen.  We just sat there with beer and champagne in hand, kicked back and enjoyed the gorgeous display in the skies.

Today, before we headed home, we drove back to Winema Camp, but hiked northward this time, where after a mile, we reached the Nestucca Bay.  We could look across the bay and see sea lions playing on the southern tip of the Nestucca Spit.  Since that hike didn't take too long, we decided to drive north to Oceanside along the Three Capes Loop.  Oceanside is where we stayed during our honeymoon, and we enjoyed wandering around the places we visited four years ago.

We missed a turn after leaving Oceanside and ended up in Tillamook, but decided that we'd driven along the Three Capes route several times already so we took Highway 101 and then Highway 22 back to Valley Junction.  It was a nice drive in the countryside, past the dairy farms of Tillamook County.  Sometimes, wrong turns end up being right turns.

We've traveled to Hawaii, Switzerland, Yellowstone and New Zealand for our week-long vacations in the past four years, but we think our long weekends at the coast are just as wonderful.  The Oregon Coast is as gorgeous as any place on the planet and it's only an hour or so away.  The hiking options are endless and we've completed only a handful of the hikes in our 101 Hikes at the Oregon Coast guidebook.  I hope we're able to visit the coast many, many more times in the years to come.

iMadness

Today, after a very rocky start, I upgraded the software on my 10 month old iPhone to the new 2.0 version. One of the new applications available was a mobile blogging app for Typepad bloggers. It was the first thing I downloaded. The result: I am posting this from my iPhone. Cool.

Can You OD on Chocolate?

No.  You can't.  But you can get pretty close.  Tomorrow is my sister-in-law's birthday, so we drove up to the big city today and wandered around NW Portland to shop and dine and just hang out.  We parked at Good Sam hospital and then walked all the way down 23rd Avenue to Burnside and then back up the other side of the street, and onto some of the side streets, stopping in shops that looked interesting.  It's not an inexpensive part of town, so the only purchase we made was a beautiful casserole dish that she bought at the Polish Pottery Place on Hoyt.

We then caught the trolley and rode down to 10th Avenue and visited a few shops in that district.  We spotted Verdun Chocolates so we each bought some goodies there.  Oh, and then we had lunch.  My sister made a stop at Title Nine to look for athletic apparel (her husband and sons are avid bicyclists).  We found a little restaurant across the street on 13th, the Daily Cafe, and enjoyed delicious chicken sandwiches with pesto and melted cheese.

Once we returned to 23rd, we decided that we simply had to have some dessert, so we walked up to Papa Haydn's for some scrumptious brownies and chocolate truffle cake.  And of course, I remembered that Moonstruck Chocolate shop was just up the street, so we made a stop there and bought a couple of after-lunch treats.

I think I'll eat a light dinner tonight.  Even though we certainly walked enough to counteract all those cocoa calories, I'm surprisingly not hungry.

Long Walk to Freedom

Last year, I returned to one of my life-long passions - reading for pleasure.  Before I retired in 2006, I was working long hours at my full-time job, and I had just returned to school and completed my college education, so leisurely reading was way down there on my to-do list.  Reading for pleasure became a casualty of my hectic life.  For the past few months, however, I've been thoroughly enjoying my return to books.  I suppose my favorite literary genre would have to be biographies.  It fascinates me to read in detail about the lives of other people.

For the past few weeks, I've been engrossed in "Long Walk to Freedom", the autobiography of Nelson Mandela.  Until I started reading this book of 650-plus pages, I had no idea that this year would mark Mandela's 90th birthday.  He's in frail health, but still commands the world's attention.  The book contains a rich accounting of his early life, his determination to get a college education in a discriminatory society, his short career as an attorney, his controversial years in the ANC, the twenty-seven years he spent in prison as a result of his refusal to renounce his anti-apartheid beliefs and his eventual election to the presidency of a democratic, post-apartheid South Africa.

His birthday on July 18th is being celebrated over the next couple of weeks.  A concert will be held on June 27th and broadcast on VH1 on June 30th, the proceeds of which will go to his 46664 charitable foundation, named after the prisoner number he was issued at Robben Island.  His foundation is dedicated to HIV/AIDS related causes.  Mandela has admitted in retirement that he wished he had done more during his presidency to prevent and alleviate the extreme suffering of the people of Africa because of the AIDS epidemic on that continent.  He lost one of his own children to AIDS.  Several of the performers at the "Free Nelson Mandela" concert twenty years ago will return for this celebration.

A timeline of the major events in his life, taken directly from his autobiography, is located here and another article about him is found here.