Where’s Nico?

We are four and a half months into this amazing adventure, and the last frames of the trip are starting to come into focus. It’s just Tentative Decisions at this point (which happens to be the title of a nice track off the “Talking Heads: 77” album), but after hearing from our very dear friends, Jay and Roberta, we’re looking to get this caravan out to northern Colorado by the end of August to meet up with them and celebrate Roberta’s and Nico’s birthdays. Nico will be turning two years old on September 1st, and Roberta has a birthday the day before, where I’m pretty sure she’s turning 29, although I’m not the best at math – just basing the age estimate on her youthful vitality.

Anyway, to the primary question that brought you here: where’s Nico?

Mount Hood National Forest!

Hey, I know we were here in the last post, but why leave? This place is gorgeous!

Since you and I last chatted, we’ve had a lot of fun out here. We’ve done a couple of hikes along the beautiful Salmon River, hiked up to Mirror Lake, visited the beautiful Little Crater Lake and Timothy Lake, hiked to the Upper and Lower Falls Lakes, took a trail around Lost Lake and visited Sahalie and Umbrella Falls. There are tons of wildflowers in the area this time of year, and bunches of huckleberries and salmonberries ripening along the trails, which you can just pick and snack on as you hike.

Nico wasn’t necessarily sold on the huckleberries:

Of course, as you may have guessed, I have a few pics to share from the hikes:

I should say, we don’t spend 24 hours a day hiking. As this trip has gone on, we’ve settled into a really nice schedule. Our day starts with Nico crawling up from under the covers and giving us some smooches to let us know it’s time to rub his belly and give him a little love.

Kristen takes him outside to do his business while I make up a coffee for her and a chai for myself, and then the three of us climb back in bed to read up on emails from the previous night, do a NYT crossword together, and lavish Nico with some more belly scratches.

Kristen doing the NYT Crossword:

Me doing the NYT Crossword:

After that, Kristen often makes up a nice warm and delicious breakfast for us most days. On other days, we just have a bowl of cereal and make up some sandwiches to eat on the trail. From there, on most days we’ll hike probably five to ten miles on the various trails in our area. But sometimes, we’ll take in a water day instead. It could be the ocean, it could be a river, or it could be a lake, but we’ll set up on the side of that body of water with a couple of small camp chairs and just relax. We bought a couple of cheap floaties a few weeks back that we’ll inflate and occasionally take Nico in to the water with us – he seems to like to float on the pink floatie that has been christened ‘the Barbie Pillow’. This week, we did a beach day along Timothy Lake:

After we finish our hike or beach time, we head back to the trailer, where we hang out on our “front porch” and enjoy a couple of drinks and listen to the Kansas City Royals game before we focus on making dinner. This is what our current front porch looks like:

And by the way? How bout them Royals???

And after dinner, we head to bed and usually watch a bit of a movie on our iPad until we drift off to sleep.

Once a week, we also have a day off the trails where we do laundry and our grocery store run and clean out the trailer. A lot of times, we may score a nice meal while we’re in town, too. This past Saturday, we headed over to Gresham, Oregon to hit a nice farmer’s market (and a surprise art fair) and Sandy, Oregon where we scored some killer cheesesteaks and took care of the rest of our errands.

It’s a nice pace that we’ve settled into! Anyway, that’s pretty much it from our end. I hope things are good for you – send me some pics and let me know what you’ve been up to too!

– Ken 7/25/24