Mumbling Madly

Typically we spend our wedding anniversary at the Oregon coast. This year we found ourselves doing it differently: How many places can we squeeze into one day? This became the Day Trip Extravaganza that was our 5 year anniversary celebration. Done during record breaking temps of 90+ degrees (we laughed when the radio advised us to ’stay indoors’ due to a smog warning–I mean REALLY, who would ask sun deprived Seattelites to do such a thing?) we set out at 9:30am.

Sometimes I feel down about where I live. When this happens I try and tap into a mental list of things I love: the breakfast place down the street is at the top. Cheap, fast, never crowded, 1/2 a block from the water. Josh and I headed over there for pancakes and eggs. The only downside was that their normally wonderful black coffee tasted obviously flavored. YUCK. The lesbian couple beside us confirmed that they also tasted a flavor. BLEH. We went to Safeway for cash and iced Starbucks coffee.

Then we had a few false starts: I had looked up a farm that was recommended off of our real estate agent’s fancy website. The farm turned out to be nothing but a glorified fruit stand. Josh and I are not confident enough to pull up to an empty rural parking lot and poke around. We like our farms touristy and filled with people. We past up the farm. Then we looked up a winery nearby–I love wine tastings in the morning! The ‘winery’ turned out to be in a strip mall next to Ikea. How is this possible? Again, we like our wineries bustling, rural, and with a huge wine barrel motif. We passed up the faux winery and headed out to Snoqualmie Falls.

By this time the temperatures had increased, the ice in our coffee had melted in our cups, and the sun roof was open. The Falls were predictably full of tourists, including a wedding party. We could have walked down the “warning: steep incline,” path for several miles to get to the bottom of the Falls. If it hadn’t been 90 we would have considered it–we even brought sneakers just in case. The problem was imagining walking back up, the heat becoming stifling despite the explosion of the Falls nearby. Someone had altered a sign, “No Dogs Allowed” to “10 Dogs Allowed:”

We headed over to the Railroad museum which was tiny: One room with a few placards explaining the process of shipping across the rails. Wooden crates stood bunched up in a corner, an old stove (“this is an example of something that would have been shipped to a household during the railroad era”), and a guide to swinging your lantern (‘Two swings means ’slow down’ to the engineer!’). A 70 minutes train ride was available for 10 bucks…I was into it, but Josh had visions of being stuck on a hot stuffy train without a bathroom for too long. We went to the Snoqualmie Brewery instead:

I’m not a beer drinker…however, I’m a sucker for beer samplers. I love getting multiple baby-sized glasses of beer–a pint is too intimidating. Josh and I are well matched for samplers: he loves all the ales and I go straight for the dark brews. Anything that tastes too hop-ey makes me scrunch up my face. Deciding we were finally hungry after our large breakfast (which combined with the heat has made us feel full for a long time) Josh and I ordered the jumbo nachos to accompany our beer. This was taking a page from our early years together in Colorado. Back then we used to split a plate of nachos at every happy hour in town, and, because it seemed required, I tried to drink beer. The nachos at the Snoqualmie Brewery were huge but low quality. They left us with a full, sickly feeling. The two of us stumbled to a local park and lay on the grass near a display of the region’s largest cross section of a log. The stump was huge, ancient, and much admired by tourists with mullets.

Josh observed some local teens spitting, talking, and causing trouble in the park. Their sense of fashion was really poor: a large kid was wearing an oversized dress shirt, baggy basketball shorts, white socks, and Sketcher-brand sneakers. Josh wondered what would happen if you put that Crime of Fashion into a Seattle teen scene. I noted that another Crime of Fashion would simple occur: chubby teenagers in lycra stretch jeans that tapered at the ankle with slip-on sneakers. Poor fashion is all relative. And I know we sound like the worst city slickers going out into the Snoqualmie region with our fancy pants opinions but, seriously, you would agree that the local fashion was bad.

Earlier in the day, I stated that I wanted to do nothing but drink coffee all day, eat food, and be as decadent as possible on my anniversary. So, despite being full of beer and nachos I decided I had to support the local coffee shop. It advertised a $2 mocha and I was not disappointed. The place was cute, local newspaper articles on the wall touting the shop’s support of the local Snoqualmie art scene, a place for kids to color, a nice cross breeze shining through the front and back doors. Aaah. I sucked down my iced mocha in no time, envying Josh for savoring his.

To be continued….