What a day

Today could have gone a lot of different ways.

I got up feeling OK. We decided to take the dogs and go on a road trip. his would be Monk's first road trip. Molly is a road vet.

This was the first road trip in the Westfalia, the first time we have had it on the road since I fixed the gas tank, the first road trip since putting in the new engine, so I approached it as a "Let's hit the road and see what happens."

When you leave the house and hit the road, there are ten things that can happen, and nine of them are bad. None of the bad things happened. Lots of good things happened.

We headed over Snoqualmi Pass to Eastern Washington, or as we put it here in Pugetopolis "Over on the Dry Side", and I decided I wanted to go over to Roslyn and then up thru Ronald and Salmon le Sac, and then up into the mountains.

I have a special place to me. Take the road from Salmon le Sac up into the mountains at a place called the Scatter Creek Campground there is a camp ground where the view is so heartbreakingly beautiful that you just don't want to leave.

One of the reasons this place is special to me is that for my fifteenth birthday I asked my family to drop me off at Scatter Creek and leave me for a week, along with my cousin Kelly. We had a blast, hiking and fishing and exploring. It is one of my fondest memories of growing up.

When you grow older you have a lot of times you want to return to some special moment or memory, and when you try, nothing is the same. The present cannot live up to the memories.

But some times, some rare once in a while, it is not just the same, it is better. Today, when we turned into the campground, it was pretty much empty. I pulled in in such a way that the view was obscured. Then I took Mrs A by the hand and said "turn around and look behind you" When she did I heard her catch her breath, because behind her was this incredible view that belongs on post cards and calendars. Not something you can just drive up and see. In the foreground is the river coming out of the lake. In the mid ground there are the winding paths of the lake, which are accented by all of the wild rice, which is this brilliant green. The far shore is a much darker green of pine trees, the purples and dark greys winding up to the blacks and brilliant blue of the sky. Not a cloud anywhere.

We stood in the stream, me in the front her behind, hugging me, the incredible view in front of us.

Some times you CAN go back and capture a magical moment. Sometimes it can be even better if you bring someone who can appreciate it as much as you can.