We spent this past weekend in the great outdoors, camping with friends at a cool little spot just outside of Leavenworth.  It was a nice little getaway, complete with good food, lots of laughs, and lovely scenery.  The landscape was beautiful, so although I was tempted to spend the weekend parked in my camping chair, I couldn’t resist the lure of the mountains and and joined the group on a hike toward Eight-Mile Lake.

After a couple of hours leisurely picking our way among the lupines and fresh Spring growth, we arrived at our destination, where the ladies grabbed a seat and took a rest, and the boys skipped stones and scrambled over logs.

The rest of the day was wonderfully lazy, with a nap, and lots of just loungin’ around the campsite – the G-man was our little camper-in-training.

Nightfall when camping means one thing, and one thing only: S’MORES!  And we are a group of people that take our dessert very seriously, so standard s’more fare just wouldn’t do – I was pretty proud of myself when I put together this perfect marshmallow-peanut butter cup sandwich.  Oooooooh yeah.

But then Jordan had to one-up me with his feat of marshmallow-Reese’s engineering genius – we all drooled as we watched this skewer turn into a gooey, chocolatey mess.  And we all groaned when he held it over the fire just a second too long and half of this fell in the ashes.  Sigh.

Sunday I awoke the pitter-patter of raindrops on the tent roof and groaned as I pictured us spending breakfast time huddled around the picnic table, trying to cook our stash of bacon and eggs in the extreme dampness.  Ick.  The thought was enough to make me squirm a little deeper into my sleeping bag and go right back to sleep.  Fortunately, we had a super-selfless camper in our midst, and as the rest of us stayed huddled in our tents, sleeping our way through the raindrops, Jordan was expertly stringing a 20-foot tarp over the picnic table, so that we would have a dry refuge from the rain.  It sure pays to camp with people who know what they’re doing…

We ended the weekend with a bang, heading out to Boudreaux Cellars, tucked away in the woods just outside of Leavenworth, for a round of winetasting.  We tasted five tasty wines and got the VIP tour, complete with a stroll though the wonderfully musty underground cellar.

And with that, we pointed our cars west and all headed back to Seattle, eager to wash the smell of campfire smoke from our clothes, but satisfied with a weekend well-spent.