Mini vacation for 4th of July

For the 4th, we took advantage of the long weekend and went to Bend, Oregon.  It's about 3 hours away from Portland.  It's in the dry area of Oregon or "high desert" where it doesn't rain like it does here.

It was such a fun town with absolutely beautiful surroundings.  We really want to go back and go skiing!  Mt. Bachelor is right there and is known for great skiing.

The first day we were there, we went to Smith Rock State Park.  It was so pretty.

We hiked the misery ridge trail which was about 1 mile straight up.  It reminded me of Sharp Top in Virginia on the Blueridge Parkway.  We had a picnic lunch and then drove to a couple different spots for Bryce to do some fly fishing.

Can you guess which one is Misery Ridge? :-)

It was hard to take your eye off of those rock climber on Monkey Face Rock!

Good little hiker, as usual.

The next day, somehow, Bryce talked me into hiking South Sister.  "Yeah, it's a hard hike, but we'll be fine."  After about 10 miles, which had us going on 5 hours of hiking already, we got almost to the top of the 3rd highest peak in the state of Oregon.  That's when we made the very wise decision of turning around.  It was 9 hours of hiking.  With a 10 month old in a hiking backpack.  Needless to say, I was not very friendly or talkative most of the way up.  Can I just say that we were actually hiking on a glacier for a little bit?  South Sister has 8 glaciers and one that is the largest glacier in Oregon. And the trail was so rocky that there were points where you had to use all fours to scramble up without slipping.  Sour, tired, blistered, and grumpy would all be words we could use to describe me that day.  (and I wasn't even carrying the baby!)  I know it was really fun for Bryce, though, and he had been wanting to get out hiking for awhile.  I was definitely a happier camper when I knew we were headed down instead of up :-)  If we had kept going to the top, which was probably going to be the most rugged stretch to hike, we would've been hiking down in the dark.  My vote was an obvious "no" with images of a screaming baby and probably some crying myself.  In the end, Bryce had a great time only wishing he had reached the summit and I was glad we did it.

Hiking with a baby means multiple stops to play and crawl around.

This is where we decided to turn around.  Good thing because I only had a couple ounces of formula left!

Snacks keep everyone happier.

Teardrop Pool was beautiful.  Highest lake in Oregon.  The water was unreal.

You can see with this map that we made it all the way to Teardrop Pool. 

The rest of the weekend was more relaxing around Bend.  Bryce surprised me the next day with a manicure (to make up for the rough day).  We hung out by the hotel pool for a few hours.  We also found a couple really good restaurants.

We walked around parks and downtown.

Madison really liked hanging out in the room and rolling around on the bed.

Sporting her first ponytail (that lasted 2.5 seconds)

After the hard hike, we went to Jackson's Corner.  It was a really cute little place with live music, incredible brick oven pizza, generous leafy salads, and coolers of wine and beer.

Bryce: Why do you need to take a picture of food again? Madison: I want some pizzaaa!

Gelato "flight" 

Another place we tried was Spork.  It was a little random, but so delicious.  The food was really unique.  It actually used to be a food cart, but was so popular that they opened a restaurant.  Check out the menu.  Apparently the chef goes on 6 month long business trips to get inspiration for his food all around the world.  His recent trip was Thailand so the food had a Thai twist mixed with Latin American ideas.  My favorite was the corn cob.  It took me right back to the streets of Mexico when I studied abroad.

Grilled sweet corn with lime butter, smoked paprika, cotija cheese, green onion, citrus chili mayo, and cilantro.  It was a mouthful of flavors

Too bad we can't take more long weekends now that Bryce has a real job...being the wife of a Ph.D. student definitely had it's perks of flexible schedules and more days off.  But of course, I'm really thankful for his job and how much he's enjoying it!