Across Flathead Lake from us is Wild Horse Island, a great hiking spot. Today the weather was warmer than it’s been in a while– I think the ol’ mercury actually hit 70 at one point. We decided it was time for an outing on the water. We fired up Trixie and Lil’ Pepe (our jet skis) and headed across the lake.
There’s a network of trails on the 2,200-acre island, and we headed up our favorite. Fortune was on our side, because we spotted two of the four wild horses who live full-time on the island. Pepper pointed them out (although the camera angle doesn’t line up quite right).
That little white speck left of her hand is one of the horses; the other is a bit farther to the left. There are signs posted on the island warning people against approaching the horses. I doubt there’s actually much danger, but we didn’t feel like walking all the way down to the forest to pet them anyway, so we continued along the trail.
The scenery was great, and we could hear various boats zipping around the water surrounding the island. The temperature might’ve been a bit chilly for playing in the lake– air temperature aside, the water is still around 50 degrees– but it was perfect hiking weather!
To our surprise, we stumbled across four deer along the trail. Three are shown in the left of the photo below; the fourth is off to Pepper’s right.
Of course this begs the question: how do the deer get to the island? It’s separated from the shores of Flathead Lake by quite an expanse of water. The closest shoreline is almost a mile and a half from the island. Did the deer swim over? Why? The mind reels.
Anyhow, it was a ton of fun and we’re excited to visit again soon and sample a few other trails.
With seminary over for the semester, it felt like summer was officially on. We’d been watching Ollie for a couple of weeks, and now it was time to head south. We packed up the car and started the drive to Utah. But we had bigger plans than just Utah.
Of course we did things like tow Zack around the neighborhood on his penny board, and of course there were plenty of board games. Skull King is a perennial favorite.
We’ve decided it’s a lot like Monopoly, in that it’s unpredictable and infuriating. And we love it.
Ollie continued being his adorable self, although now it was nice to be able to pawn him off on Mom and Dad when he was grumpy and tired.
After a few days there, it was time to put some more miles on the car. About a month ago, Kyra had mentioned that she was thinking of taking a road trip to California, just to relax on the beach. Pepper and I decided to take her up on the offer, and the three of us planned a beach trip. Zack couldn’t join us because he’s still not allowed to leave the state of Utah, and Alex and Kaitlyn had just enjoyed three weeks of vacationing and needed to get back to their jobs.
First stop: Las Vegas. It’s an easy drive from Provo, and a nice stop. We haven’t been there in a while. Pepper and I enjoyed a late-night walk along the Strip.
Everything is bigger in Vegas, it seems. I love all the lights at night (and frankly, during the day it looks downright pedestrian.)
The fountains at the Bellagio are Pepper’s favorite attraction, so we had fun watching them for a bit.
The next day we made a stop at the Las Vegas Temple, which was gorgeous. As was my daughter!
The temperature hit 105 degrees that day. We were sort of longing for the cool 60-degree weather in Montana! But hey, it is a desert, after all. With another Vegas night under our belts, we climbed back into the car and continued south toward San Diego and the beach Kyra had been dreaming of. We hit Ocean Beach that afternoon. It was cloudy and 60 degrees. Better than 105, unless you’re hoping for a hot sunny beach day!
Friends of ours had recommended a restaurant called Sushi Ota. They said it was the best sushi around, so we made a reservation for 5pm and pulled up a few minutes early. The restaurant hadn’t opened yet, and it was in a dark corner of a non-descript strip mall. It didn’t seem promising. At the stroke of 5, though, we headed to the door and noticed a whole crowd of other people climbing out of their cars and doing the same. By 5:05 the place was packed. It was actually kind of funny. I saw a family come to the front desk and get turned away because they didn’t have a reservation, and the owner simply said they couldn’t accommodate anyone all night– they were completely booked. And this was a Wednesday night!
It proved to have amazing sushi, at least according to Pepper and Kyra. I don’t do sushi.
Back on Ocean Beach, we walked the pier and admired the surfers who were working the waves in the cold water.
Undaunted by the chilly weather, the next day we spent some time at Torrey Pines Beach. There were amazing views from atop the cliffs.
The beach stretches for miles, so we spent some time wandering along it.
No more sushi… it was time for a good old burger. We went to Hodad’s, a little hole-in-the-wall place in Ocean Beach that we’d visited seven years ago. It was still a hoppin’ place, packed to the gills, and serving the same messy but amazing burgers. And their decor didn’t disappoint. In the years since we were last there, they’ve added a little VW bus completely covered in stickers.
After stuffing ourselves with burgers, fries, and mammoth shakes, we walked along the beach again. The surfers were still at it.
The weather forecast continued to call for cloudy, 60-degree days. Kyra was disappointed that it wasn’t proper beach weather. After some thought, we figured the next day we’d head north to Los Angeles, where it would be sunny and 80-something. Along the way we stopped at the San Diego Temple. What a magnificent building! It’s one of the most well-known temples, and for good reason.
Here are my two favorite beautiful women, in front of this beautiful place.
We spent the day at Long Beach, just being lazy. That was what Kyra had been after all along. After a dinner at the Belmont Pier, we returned to San Diego. Pepper was tired after a long day, but Kyra and I figured on our last night we needed to return to Hodad’s for one more of their legendary shakes.
Now that’s the way to make a shake! It seems like about a half-gallon of ice cream, overflowing the huge steel cup. Sweet.
Our trip plan called for a one-day drive all the way back to Provo, and we made good time. We stopped in Las Vegas for lunch at Maggiano’s, which is my (and Kyra’s) favorite Italian restaurant. I haven’t had their lasagna for over three years, and it was just as good as I remembered.
Vegas was again around 110 degrees, but somewhere in southern Utah we recorded our record temperature for the trip: a sweltering 117 degrees.
Once back in Provo, we spent a few more days with the kids before returning to Montana. All told, we were gone for sixteen days and had a great time with everyone. According to our odometer, we covered 3,388 miles.
As a side note, we did all of this in our Tesla. People are always asking us about how electric cars handle long road trips, and I can say this one was a smashing success. Although we had to stop occasionally to recharge, it wasn’t any more often than we would’ve had to hit gas stations. And we just laughed at the six-dollar-a-gallon gas prices in California as we pulled up to Tesla Supercharger stations that cost about a third as much for the equivalent mileage. Though Teslas are uncommon in Montana, they’re everywhere in California. I can see why.
We have a few other massive road trips planned for the year, and I’m excited for them. What a great start to the summer!
A few years ago, Zack and Kyra asked if I’d tow them around the neighborhood on a sled attached to the back of my car. (There was snow on the road.) I obliged, and we had a great time cruising around Serenity Circle.
Tonight, Zack asked if I’d tow him on a penny board around the neighborhood. The asphalt is really smooth, making it prime territory for a skateboard. Again I obliged, and he held onto the side of my car (well, technically his car now) as we cruised. These photos don’t really do it justice, because it looks like he’s just standing beside a stationary car. But if you look closely at his hair you’ll see it blowing back in the wind.
At one point I was doing about 25mph, which is probably far too fast for this neighborhood– cars can pop out of garages or blind corners at any time. He said it felt like around 40mph. I may be 50, and he may be 20, but that doesn’t mean we can’t act like a couple of 15-year-olds.
And yes, we got some strange looks from a few people who were walking outside.
Alex and Kaitlyn headed out on a cruise, and left their offspring with us. Sure, we’re experienced and amazing parents, but sheesh, it’s been like twenty years since we had a one-year-old in our care for more than a few hours at a stretch.
Fortunately being a parent is much like riding a bike, in that you don’t really forget how to do it, and at times you crash spectacularly. Ollie seemed to have a great time with us. Part of it, we decided, was the simple fact that we have so much space. Compared with a tiny college apartment, our house– and the expansive yard surrounding it– probably seems like an endless vista of possibilities to someone who’s less than two feet tall.
He enjoyed riding on our backs as we hiked the driveway and did chores…
One day as I was destroying the yellow menace in our yard, he was following me around and picking a few of the dandies himself. At one point, though, he apparently felt like it had been too much walking, so he plopped down in the grass and just sat there with an angry expression.
(Yes, our grass is obscenely tall… we mowed it the next day.)
As required by law, grandparents are known for spoiling their grandchildren, and we did plenty of that. He was happy at mealtime when he could enjoy bowls of mac and cheese, mixed with the occasional Cheeto or handful of chocolate chips.
He even endured a ten-hour drive back home to Utah, sitting in his car seat with a look of occasional wonder mixed with some zoned-out stares out the window. After arriving at the villa, he actually climbed back into his car seat (which was sitting in the garage) and attempted to buckle himself in!
Although we didn’t enjoy waking up at 5:30 every morning when he’d decided sleepy time was over, and our productivity took a nosedive, it was a blast to have him around for a couple of weeks. Grandparenting is cool.
Kids love water. Kids also love rocks and throwing things. So it stands to reason that kids love throwing rocks into water.
We put it to the test today by taking Ollie down to Yellow Bay and letting him play on the shore of Flathead Lake. He absolutely loved it.
Even though it’s May, the water temperature these days is hovering around 45 to 50 degrees. Still, you get used to it pretty quickly. He didn’t mind having his legs in the water while he picked up handfuls of rocks and threw them.
Naturally we decided to take him out on the jet skis, so we bundled him into a life jacket that was literally as big as he is. He seemed excited about riding with his Aunt Kyra.
They cruised around the bay for a while, but after maybe ten minutes of it, the little guy was literally falling asleep.
Kyra said he was sort of nodding off. I wonder if maybe he wanted to go fast, so this slow cruising just wasn’t exciting enough.
In any case, when he returned to the shore he was thrilled to throw some more rocks. Life was good. Heading home, he showed us what he thought of a day on the lake:
Today was our last day of seminary for the school year, which means I can finally turn off that pesky alarm that chimes at 5:35 in the morning:
As is tradition, we had some food and just chatted for our final class. Strangely enough, a number of the kids insisted that pizza would be a good option for food. Not cold breakfast pizza, like some people enjoy, but hot fresh-baked pizza right out of the oven in the church kitchen. So we obliged, and made three big homemade pizzas last night. The kids wolfed them down– nearly everyone grabbed a slice or two.
Afterward we decided to snap a class photo. Although I’m happy to avoid 5:35, I’ll miss these yahoos each morning.
For two and a half years, we’ve been using our “it’s only temporary” setup with a TV sitting on a piece of plywood which in turn sits atop two big Yamaha speakers. It works, but it looks ghetto and the TV is way off-center for everyone on the couch except the one Sweet Spot. I finally decided to do something about it.
First, I imagined what it might look like if the TV was mounted on the wall with in-wall speakers for left, right, and center channels.
It’s tricky with the fireplace, of course, because you shouldn’t mount a TV– or any nice, expensive, meltable thing– right above a fireplace. After some discussion, though, we agreed we never really use the fireplace anyway, so it’ll be fine. I called a drywall guy to see if he could patch up the holes I’ll inevitably make, and then re-texture the wall to match the rest of it. To my astonishment, he said he could do the work three days later. I’m used to having contractors tell me their schedule is booked months in advance. This meant I had to really get cracking.
After a deep breath, I took a drill and a compass saw and went to work dissecting the drywall. I had no idea what to expect back there; with the fireplace and some closets on the back side of the wall, it was anyone’s guess. Sure enough, the studs were kind of a hodgepodge.
I minimized the drywall I removed, because this was mainly a voyage of exploration. As it turned out, the placement of the studs dictated where the speakers could go. On the left, there’s only one space wide enough. On the right, there’s a big horizontal support just above my cut, pushing both speakers down a bit. And sadly there’s not a space for a center channel, because there are three studs alongside the fireplace and they shouldn’t be cut.
My favorite part was removing the three-way switches that control our ceiling fan, and being reminded of the Switch That Does Nothing. Thom and I discovered it a few years ago when meddling with the electrical stuff. You can see how it has a single line wire coming in, but nothing coming out. (The brass is the ground, of course.) I have no idea why you’d wire something like this. It does, however, explain the roughly half-dozen other switches scattered through the house that I can’t figure out… they probably also go nowhere.
With the switches rewired and my rough speaker holes cut out, it was time for the drywall guy to get to work. He did a great job patching the hole and re-texturing everything to match.
This morning I added a coat of paint, cut the final speaker holes, and installed them. Oh, and I found a cool little tube that can route cables through a wall between rooms. That’s important because the stereo equipment actually sits in the closet on the other side of the wall.
After some shenanigans with the TV mounting hardware, we had it securely attached to the wall and it was time to give it a whirl.
Mission accomplished! Another house project checked off my list, only two and a half years after I conceived of it…
Apparently today is the day the dandelions bloom. Yesterday I didn’t see any of them in our yard, and today as we were driving past the orchard for lunch, I saw this horror:
They seemed to come from nowhere! Pepper thinks the flowers spread out in the sunlight, and then when the sun fades, they sort of quiet down and hide. It’s probably true, because the courtyard looked like it had two dozen dandies but when I went out to pick them a few hours later, there were only four or five. And once the flowers have closed, it’s hard to spot them.
For the past year, Pepper and I have continued our decades-long tradition of making homemade pizza weekly, but with a twist: we’ve been making a half-dozen mini pizzas at a time, baking two for ourselves that night, and freezing the rest. Then, when a hankering for pizza strikes us, we pull these uncooked masterpieces out of the freezer, pop them into the oven, and in 15 minutes we have a delicious fresh hot pizza. Nice!
The other night we somehow got on the topic of our pizza tradition, and I mused about making pan-style pizzas. Since we turn a batch of dough into crusts for six pizzas, they’re each pretty thin and end up basically being baked tortillas when they’re done. Why not use a little more dough per pizza, and have a more substantial crust? I found some seven-inch pizza pans online, ordered them, and today I went to work.
I made the dough, prepared the toppings, and jammed everything into these four little pans. Bonus: double layers of toppings on all of them!
Now they’re sitting in the freezer, awaiting the real test. When I next have a hankering, I’ll put one of these puppies in the oven and see if this new style works out. And if not, it’s back to tortillas, which are still awesome.
