The Wood Between the Worlds

OK folks...this was our New Year celebration this year!
My friend found this GREAT deal to rent out a boy scout lodge up on Mt. Hood for New Years Eve.  I had visions of a big picture window over a fluffy snowy night landscape, a roaring fireplace, a cozy sofa, delicious food galore, games, kids tucked into bunk beds, tubing and skiing the next day with intermittent hot cocoa breaks.  Mmm...now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout!

See we do not get snow where we live, except a dusting maybe 1-2 time a year (two years ago we were lucky to get enough that I was actually able to cross country ski around on  the streets in our neighborhood!).  And most days we are glad about the lack of snow.  It's nice to have 40-50 degree weather all winter: no driving in snow, no shoveling it, and running outdoors all year round!  But occasionally we do miss it.  Especially the kids.  So now we have to take vacations in the winter to visit the snow.  {Thankfully beautiful Mt. Hood is only an hour away...I'm telling ya, Portland is the best place to live...if only we could convince all our family and friends to move here, we would never leave.} 

The night of New Years Eve was beautiful.  Not a cloud in the sky.  Brent had to work, so we couldn't head up to the lodge until the evening.  And of course, we had to stop at the store to buy new sleeping bags since our old ones mysteriously (?) disappeared out of our garage sometime this past year.  By the time we made it to the lodge it was dark and COLD!  Oh MY coldy cold!  But the stars were aMAZing!

We proceeded to walk through the dark, cold, beautiful snow down a trail through the forest to the lodge.  And because I failed to thoroughly read the information about the lodge that was previously forwarded to me, I did not know that the parking lot was so far from the lodge!  And thus I packed WAY TOO much stuff.  So after many freeze-your-nostrils-when-you-breathe COLD trips back and forth to the lodge (did I mention it was COLD?), I woke up a completely passed out Joshua who was still in the car...to find out that he had pee'd his pants (he's going to kill me if he finds out that I'm writing this).  Oh joy.  He never pees his pants.  Ever.  Out of all times, why does he choose NOW when it is so COLD out and we've already taken all the bags to the lodge so there's nothing for him to change into?  His clothes would literally freeze to his skin if we tried carrying him to the lodge.  WAIT!  We still have MY bag in the car!  So I quickly change him into my yoga pants my "Loving Support Makes Breastfeeding Work" t-shirt (for under his heavy winter coat).  But the pants are way too big!  THANKFULLY, I have a lot of experience with improvising on the spot and I'm always prepared for such instances (and THANKFULLY I over packed so I had extra clothes :-).  I had an elastic around my wrist for later pony tail use, and I'm able to make a pony tail in the yoga pants so that they'll stay on.  Crisis averted.  Whew!  But we do have a future blackmail picture:

By the time we got all of our stuff in the lodge...and put our kids to bed, we stood around eating our treats for about 20 minutes and then it was midnight.  yAy!  WE tried to drink our Martinelli's, but it was frozen solid.  Thankfully we and our friends know how to laugh at such AmazING situaTions!

After midnight and no games :-( we retired to our bunk room with  no doors...totally open to the rest of the lodge (where other strangers are staying!), and slip into our very rustic plywood bunks with about a foot of space between our faces and the bunk above us.  This place was build for scouts and I'm going to venture a guess that it wasn't built to code.  I'm going to say though that 1) at least the bathroom had a door that locked (although OUR bathroom was always occupied by guests from other levels)  2) at least we had a warm place to sleep because it was SO VERY cold outside 3) at least there was a huge blazing fire in the lobby of the lodge, which our unit overlooked (although if the lodge had caught on fire in the night I'm not sure we would've been able to shimmy ourselves out of our bunk space before the rustic wooden lodge burned to the ground.)

community fireplace

happy new year with friends!

BUT!  Despite all that, we witnessed the MOST beautiful scenery.  And that made it all worth it.  There is something magical about the soft, stillness of the snow covered forest at night.  There's nothing like it in the whole wide world.  Maybe it's so magical because Brent and I spent the winter months growing in our admiration for each other, and we had our first kiss under lightly falling snow in a soft, cold forest at night.  (We were hiking, OK?)

The next morning, we were all alive and ready for the
TUBING HILL:

^ Brent going down head first...that RULE BREAKER!