Where would you like to be?
This is a ‘No Host Til Diane Gets Up’ Cafe.
Coffee & Tea under the window.
Goodies on the platters.
Goodies on the platters.
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Vacation planning at every table.
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Please recommend (and unrecommend the Cafe/Lounge from earlier)
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May the 4’s take you where you want to go.
I actually wouldn’t mind be here if only tomorrow wasn’t Monday.
Oh yes, that looks absolutely great.
Where is it?
It’s Zion National Park.
I thought I’d say hi early. Hi.
The most amazing thing was there was only 16 minutes between our two sign-offs.
I think we should one or two of the pictures from your Italian villa for Tuesday’s no-host day so you can sit at work and daydream about not sitting at work. Do you know if they copyrighted?
I thought about signing off before you left …but that would have been wrong 🙂
The website’s terms of use say that they are copyrighted. Plus, since the date is so far away, I think it might just make me sad. Maybe doing something closer to the date would be better.
We won’t use them then.
We have different philosophies. I like thinking about trips I’m going to take. To be sure of getting reservations for the Phantom Ranch in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, you have to make them 13 months in advance. We’ve done it twice — I’m really good at enjoying anticipation.
Thanks, Andi.
Checked out some pages, what a great destination. Is this where you spent your recent vacation – sorry, I have not paid much attention in the morning cafes lately, but have noticed some fabulous images by you and Jim.
We were in southe western Utah and did a couple of hikes in Zion but we spent most of our time in the southern part of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and neighboring BLM lands.
If you want to see more pictures from the trip, they are a bunch here. If you click on any picture, you can see the larger version or the slideshow will take you through them one at a time.
The “waves” are amazing. And the framing on Snow Canyon is wonderful, imo. Speaking of framing–do you ever enlarge your photos, frame them, and put them up on your walls?
Everything is in photo albums or on the computers. Part of the reason is that we have a post and beam house which severely limits your ability to hang things and the other part is that we would never be able to pick which ones.
Thanks. Really great images, makes me want to go see it for myself.
I’d love to be a place with good spring skiing…
Did you know that there is skiing at Mt. Hood year round?
No, I didn’t. Just checked a page for summer skiing camp there. Looks tempting, but summer vacation will be back to Norway as usual. Summer cabin on the south coast.
That looks lovely. The closest I’ve been to Norway was Trollhattan, Sweden (in February) which I admit rather dulled my desire to see more of that part of the world for a long time. But I’m finally over it and Norway has always seemed like a wonderful place to go wandering.
Heh – I have also been to Trollhättan in February (20+ years ago). Cold, damp and windy; your sentiment was quite understandable.
No contest — Norway in the summer would have to be your first choice.
Norway is really really high on my list of places to go. Maybe next year …
When I do go, I’m going to bombard you with questions!
No problem.
Last year, curly joined us for the Norway-trip. While the asklets were in camp, we did the real ‘tourist’ thing. We got our package from this operator and were happy with the services (check link to ‘Picture Galleries’).
Thanks! I’ve bookmarked the page.
I go here in July/August:
and I always wish I was there.
Where’s that, mary?
It looks like a beautiful place.
It’s Lake Kabetogama up on the Minnesota/Ontario border. It’s part of Voyageur’s National Park. I go every summer for a week to 10 days.
I taught with a guy who retired a couple of years ago and he now spends all late fall, winter, and early spring planning and organizing canoe and fishing trips to Voyageurs and Boundary Waters and the rest of the year taking groups there. He is very happy.
That sounds like heaven. For a while my mom tried to talk my dad into moving there for a year after he retired and making himself available to tutor math and teach at the local junior college. She only wanted to commit to a year in case they didn’t like it. But nothing came of it.
Ha! First, Lake of the Ozarks is NOT this beautiful. But the real reason you can tell this isn’t Lake of the Ozarks is because every last square inch of water is NOT covered with boats (driven by drunk kids and drunk middle aged men).
My sister’s ex-husband’s family had a place at Lake of the Ozarks way back some dirt road and it was gorgeous and really quiet. But then again, the last time I was there was in the early 80’s.
Lake of the Ozarks is OK, but I like things quieter.
Voyageurs is one of the least used national parks in the country. So there’s a lot of wildlife and nature and not really that many people. The park has some photos here
Voyageurs has always looked like a lovely place (though I hear the bugs are fierce) but since Jim doesn’t swim, is mildly afraid of water, and we tend to like to take vacations where there are lots of exposed rocks, we’ve never really thought about going there.
Almost the entire park is water so maybe it isn’t for you. Bugs never like me so they don’t bother me. Guess I’m not sweet enough.
I love it though. It’s my favorite place in the U.S.
Here’s where we stay. Last week when I was having a bad day I pulled up the website to see what they had changed and on the spur of the moment I e-mailed the owners to say hi. Betsy e-mailed me back laughing. Turns out I was the third e-mail she’d gotten from our group that day, just saying “hi” and wishing we were there. We must have all been on the same wavelength.
Looks like a great place to spend your vacations. And see, anticipation is nice.
Yes, anticipation IS nice. I don’t really mind if you do Italy pictures if you find some non-copyrighted ones. Mostly I think I don’t want it all focused on me.
I’ll be back after I shower.
told us that it was all about you. And I always believe everything you tell me. But now I think I’ll wait and do it some time you aren’t expecting it — more fun that way.
Feeling all squeaky clean now?
yep, with nice dry hair too!
Do you bookmark embarrassing things that we say to use later or do you just have a photographic memory or is there some way to search for these things that I haven’t figured out?
The Search button is a useful little devil.
I must be search impaired because I can never find anything.
The only thing I miss about my ex and his family is their log cabin on Lake Superior, near Sault Ste. Marie Michigan where his parents still live – sturdy, cold-hearted bastards that they are.
We used to take the kids there every August when it was hot as blazes in Cleveland and we’d have to build a fire to keep warm and wrap up in blankets in the early morning and sit out in the front yard in the Adirondack chairs sipping coffee and listening to the loons and watching the smooth as glass water.
Even in August the water was rarely above 65 degrees but one summer we went in June for a wedding and it was absolutely icy, but the air temp. was hot. That’s when my oldest son, Owen, who was about 8 at the time coined the phrase “scrotal hypothermia” when he walked out about waist high into the water and got paralyzed with the cold.
of cool in August but I like to be doing things on vacation. I have absolutely no talent for sitting still.
Like your son’s coinage.
I’d usually spend a good 30 minutes sitting still until all four of the little guys got up, then I didn’t sit down again until they were in bed.
It was quite a feat to gain 100 lbs. with all that running around, but somehow I managed.
I love it up north when the August heat is here in St. Louis. Since the lakes are smaller than than the Great Lakes (of course) they don’t get quite as cold so you can swim and those who like to water ski can do that or you can take your drink and your noodle and just float around and talk after being out all day.
During the day there is fishing and hiking and photography (for those so inclined) and bird watching and bear watching … it’s fun.
That sounds about perfect. It gets so blistering hot and humid here in August, it’s almost unbearable.
Do you go to Pamlico every summer? It’s about a 4 hour drive from here.
First week of August for about 5 years now. Where are all your beach pictures from?
Topsail Island, down near Wilmington. My in-laws have a little old shoebox beach cottage there, tucked between million dollar ones. It’s about a 2.5 hour drive from Raleigh.
I have friends that go to Topsail…how far is that from Ocracoke (Or the Morehead city/Atlantic Beach area)?
I want to say about an hour north, but I really don’t know. I should check it out.
If it’s that close, maybe we should try to meet up when I’m down there…wanna go kayaking? 🙂
I’m seriously thinking so. I’d like to get away with the younger boy (the other one works) and have a couple of days by ourselves. He loves kayaking but all he has is an inflatable one that he doesn’t like so I guess we’d rent. We opted for the inflatable one because it was easier to transport but it’s kind of a pain in the neck and doesn’t respond the way a hardshell does.
We’d have to stay far enough away from you guys that if it turned out we hated each other it wouldn’t be weird. 🙂
Land of Family Values.
I swear I just got a whiff of pine.
Hi kansas! I hear you’re going to be in Fairview Heights on May 4?
I am. I was going to e you closer to the event to ask if there’s any chance you might drop by. You don’t have to buy a book! You can stand at the back of the crowd (I should be so lucky to have a “crowd.” You may feel conspicuous if you’re one of two people) and lurk and then decide if you want to meet f-to-f. 🙂 If there’s time, and you’re up for it, it would be so much fun to have dinner or even a cup of coffee.
I want to come by and have coffee/dinner! I’ve calendered it and hopefully nothing work related will get in the way. We can talk closer to the date.
Oh, yay!! That’ll be so nice! Yep, we’ll talk closer to.
The only place we ever go in the summer is to Everett, a Seattle exurb of about 100,000 people. We get a hotel room with a swimming pool and a free breakfast buffet, hang around town during the day for a couple of days, and at night go to watch the Mariners’ short season class A team play baseball. It’s small-town baseball at its finest. Reasonable ticket prices, small crowds, friendly people, games for the kids (inflatable bounce houses, pitching speed booths and the like), corny promotions sponsored by local businesses, and a game where you get to see the future stars of baseball learning how to play in the big leagues.
We have seen quite a few players who will probably make it to the Big Show. Their names probably won’t mean anything to you unless you’re a fan of minor league baseball, except perhaps for Michael Garciaparra, brother of Dodgers 1B Nomar Garciaparra. (We saw a couple of his first professional games. He was definitely underwhelming at the time.)
The reason we stay close to home in the summer is because it’s generally not terribly hot in Seattle in July and August, and the heat and crowds would kill us anywhere we decided to go. If the heat and crowds didn’t kill us, the in-season prices for hotels and the like would. So, we do our traveling in the off-season when hotels are cheaper and temperatures are lower.
Here’s one of our favorite spots:
I have no idea who the people in the picture are. The setting is La Push, Washington. The Quillayute tribe owns a resort there and we like to go down, watch the ocean and look at the stars at night.
Cool that you got it to do slide show for us!
That wasn’t me. I found it that way and decided that you’d get a better idea of what the place was like from this than from the picture I was actually looking for — a closeup of the haystack rock at the north end of the beach.
All of the rooms at the resort face the ocean. I like to go out on the deck and watch the container ships going up and down the coast. One year the weather was pretty wild and the tides was very high anyway (11 feet, I think) so it made for some cool wave-watching.
Andi and I spent a great late afternoon and early evening watching the sun set at Rialto Beach. It was a wonderful place. The whole Olympic penninsula was a great place to vacation: mountains, glaciers, rain forests, beaches, tidal pools, and even a desert.
Is anybody home?
Where ya been and watcha been doing?
Sleeping mostly. How have things been going around here?
You’ve been MIA around here and we missed you.
Speaking of, has anyone heard anything from Brenda? I hope she only lost electricity.
I saw her in one of the front page threads earlier, so she must be all right.
Good, thanks!
Hi, did you get any of that tornado weather?
If we did I slept through it. How’s everyone doing?
I missed you in yesterday’s cafe. And I could have used your late night help — I went to bed before midnight.
The world must be coming to an end if Mary went to bed before midnight.
Now I’m really worried. I thought I was the only champion sleeper around here.
Apparently, the world can withstand all kinds of challenges to the natural order. 🙂
I almost went to bed earlier — I even put up the first lounge as Froggybottom because I wasn’t sure how late I would last.
But then I got a little second wind. (BTW Supersoling was there for a while. You missed him.) And then in the second lounge Andi came back and became a total night owl. It was amazing. Like an alien had taken over her body. I went to bed 15 minutes after she left.
Andi was a night owl and Maryb went to bed early?? It must be The Rapture. Look up and see if there are a lot of bare feet and bottoms ascending to heaven.
Has Indy been around? Anybody know how she is?
And what about ChocolateInk?
I see that Mary got a second wind. Whew. No Rapture yet, though Andi staying up late is a very ominous sign.
Indy was a night owl too last night! It was a freaky night.
I last saw chocolate a few days ago commenting on a diary but she hasn’t been in the cafe in ages! I wish she would stop by.
I always miss all the good stuff. Today I’m trying to figure out how I messed up my wireless mouse.
The touch pad on my laptop is driving me crazy, but at least the wireless keyboard is working.
It is something alien — Daylight Savings Time. The same kind of thing would happen when I would go east and I would get stay up till my home time zone bed time but wake up at the local time
From Chez Cabin, home of the many omelets this morning!
How is everyone? I just want AndiF to plan my next vacation, so all I have to do is show up. Or maybe maryb…
I’ll be back with a vacation picture after I finish eating my eggs.
It almost as much fun as going. The problem — for you — is that I’m plan vacations for things that I want to do.
Hey, as long as it’s outdoors, I’m happy. Judging from all your pictures, none of the CabinPeople would be disappointed.
so are you cooking omelets for all of us?
get in line…I still have some sauteed mushrooms toput in another one!
The joys of getting 7 or 8 eggs a day…
Fishing on the edge of Pamlico sound:
I have been to that sound. It is a beautiful area
Of CBtY’s fishing spot:
Do you bring your own kayaks or rent them when you get there?
I usually bring one or two, and rent another. That’s mine in the picture. The big draw there is being able to push off the bank behind the house every night after dinner to go watch the sunset.
We spend a lot of time at the cottage which is right on the ocean, but I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a place on the sound too, especially at sunset. The surf and constant wind get tiresome after awhile.
That’s a great picture with the clouds reflecting into the still water.
I am trying my hand at live blogging. I am eating breakfast at Mcdonalds while my car is getting an oil change. I hope everyone had a great nights sleep. I have been working on a web site design all morning and hopefully will have it finished and published for all to see later today.
Live blogging from McDonald’s – I’m riveted! What are you eating?
ROTFLMAO!!!! I am having the large breakfast platter and I strongly suggest anyone look for an IHOP or Denny’s instead. LOL
I can’t eat sweet things in the morning – I need sausage and hash browns. My husband always gets some pancakey thing covered in gooey fruity stuff and tons of whipped cream. I don’t know how you eat something like that in the morning.
Well, I do love sweet things but prefer omeletes or something simillar for breakfast. I eat pancakes for dinner sometimes but prefer them without syrup. A little powdered sugar or marmalade tastes better to me.
There’s a new version of Robo-rater that actually works. Follow this link to pick up the new version (and please delete the old one).
I wish you could see the happy dance I just did because it finally worked for me!
Woo-hoo!
Omir! This is beyond cool. I guess I missed the previous effort, but this works like a dream on my Windows XP Firefox. Now I need a RoboThankYou!
Bye everyone. See you later today.
Have a good day MaryB
Here ya’ go. I’m gone for awhile too. See ya later.
I’m heading out for a while also. I’ve got to figure out what is going on with my computer. Hopefully I’ll have everyting fixed soon.
Take care in the pond.