Four Part Harmony

Quite the busy and fun time we had this past weekend…We left town pretty early on Friday and didn’t get home until Monday afternoon. In the interest of brevity, some pictures:

Friday afternoon: Rick and Margie’s wedding up outside of Welches, OR on Mt. Hood.A really nice little ceremony, officiated by Margie’s uncle, with many friends in attendance.

A family photo, taken just before the wedding. Doyle, Mark, and I played some music for the ceremony, and our band played again at the reception.

Anna’s friend and long lost next-door-neighbor Nora was in town with her family for the wedding. All the way from Bozeman, MT. They played kind of shy together for a while but in the end got some good play time in together.

Nora, Anna, and Kadin playing around on the grass during the wedding ceremony.

Saturday morning, a large contingent of the folks who were at the wedding headed up and over the mountain, down through Hood River, across into Washington and up to Trout Lake for the 3rd annual Last Chance Barn Dance. After all the fun we had last year, it’s become an event not to be missed.

Anna had a really fun time. She had a really strong independent streak going on all weekend and wanted to be left to do her own thing. Several times she wandered off and made it clear that I should just keep doing whatever I was doing and not follow her. It was nice to see her making so much fun for herself in all these creative ways.

Tricia and Bill were gracious enough to let us share their styling camp setup, stove, sun shade, drinking water and everything else with them the whole weekend. Here’s Tricia holding Milo. We didn’t camp out at the site because last year wasn’t so conducive to sleeping two year olds much less sleeping newborns. We stayed in town at a little bed and breakfast with the happy newlywed couple instead! It was great!

Nicki, Tricia, and Molly looking…coordinated. Molly and Owen were in town so we got to hang out for the first time in many, many years.

Grady, me and Milo, and Owen.

Owen playing my guitar. Owen’s the little known songwriter famous for the song “woodpecker lips”, which you may or may not have heard yet.

Carl was magically transformed into Carzol when Mo brought this hat back from the big garage sale going on back in town.

It was a fun time all in all. Of course, we missed a good majority of what the whole deal was mostly all about which was the lineup of musicians playing. But with the exception of a really fun campsite/back of the truck afternoon set form Jackstraw on Sunday, most of the music didn’t get rolling until 8:00 or so. The barn was really too much for Milo anyway, so we didn’t subject him to any of it. Saturday we split back to town early and just crashed. Sunday evening I brought everyone home, got Anna to sleep, and then headed back and managed to catch most of the acts on the bill. The music was stellar, but for us this year the fun was really mostly about seeing and hanging out with old friends.

Monday morning we rallied our energy and went and picked some huckleberries up in the national forest outside of Trout Lake. The sawtooth berry fields, about eleven miles west of Trout Lake up a dusty washboarded forest service road, are one of the biggest best expanses of huckleberry bushes I’ve ever seen. And this is prime time for them too. The weather was much nicer than Saturday and Sunday. Nice and sunny and no wind.

Anna helped pick quite a few. It takes a lot of little huckleberries to amount to anything, but they’re worth it. Anna had no interest in eating any of the berries. “I like blueberries” she said. I tried to convince her that these were exactly like blueberries, but better. That never works though. Somewhat surprisingly, she clued in to some wild strawberries that were growing on the ground among the bushes. I don’t know if you are familiar with wild strawberries out here, but each little strawberry is about the size of a pea at best (they’re very sweet and delicious though). She immediately took to picking and eating those, to the point where she completely abandoned huckleberry picking.

We picked and froze a few quarts in all.

A nice end to a nice long weekend.