Thanksgiving 2010

Thanksgiving Day is a birthday bonanza in the family: MaryJo, Mike Gage, and Gramma Mae. Plus Karen and Vic's Anniversary. Lots to be thankful for, before we even start counting what has come our way this year.

We started our Thanksgiving Day with morning walk at gorgeous autumnal San Felsaco Hammock, near home. We took the 5.6 mile loop and enjoyed some Florida-style hills, some pine forest, and some natural grow woods. The weather was perfect; we did not even need long sleeves. The animals were hiding at the beginning. But as the trail warmed up some tree lizards came out to bask, then the woodpeckers appeared, and finally four armadillos, all of whom posed for photos.

Back home we completed the cooking that we'd started on Wednesday. It was a Bon Apetit marathon two-day meal preparation, resulting in our best, most juicy turkey ever; great stuffing made with a three pound mix of Anaheim, poblano, and jalapeno peppers, Monterey Jack cheese, and masa corn bread; maple syrup basted butternut squash; new potatoes roasted with onions and garlic; and blueberry-cranberry pie! Worth all the chopping and sauteeing, and almost all the dish-washing. 

Friday and Saturday we spent in Cedar Key. The Community Tree Lighting and sing-along were Friday at the beach and the Jingle Bell Hop on Saturday. The holidays are definitely here, island style.

 

 

 

Cedar Key Gearing Up for The Winter Season

The Artist Poses with Her Work

Cedar Key is always sleepy in some ways, and almost always hopping in others. At this time of year, many seasonal residents are returning and the social scene gears up.

The Cedar Key Arts Center began its 2010-2011 Season Saturday Night, November 20, with the opening of "Mosaic Magic" by Valerie Bretl. She is a local artist and often uses tiles made by another local artist, Amy Gernhardt, to create her works. Valerie has just had a piece chosen for an international juried show in Austin in a few months. Inspired by the beauty and intimacy of our natural surroundings, she has transformed the ancient art of mosaics with her own contemporary style that flows between the real and the surreal. The exhibit featured 20 new creations. Just because we are on an island in the Gulf, and miles from the nearest chain restaurant or shop not owned by local folks doesn't mean we are short of pretty nifty artists.

After the opening, we wandered over to the Black Dog Wine and Tables with friends to sit on the deck outdoors.  The water slapped against the shore and a nearly full moon lite up the Gulf. Pretty good way to spend a Saturday evening.

This website shows a couple of the art pieces:
http://cedarkeynews.com/All/4865.html

This one is the featured artist:
http://mosaicworksbyvbretl.com/index.html

And this one is the artist whose tiles are sometimes used in the mosaics:
http://www.cedarkeypottery.com/galleries.html

A Cedar Key Evening 11-20-2010

Fall Decorations in Cedar Key

It seems as if we just put up our fall decorations and it is already time to think about when we will be packing them away and getting out our Christmas finery. The term "finery" may be a bit overblown because our recent practice has been to retire some of our less favored ornaments and migrate them to Cedar Key. This seems to us to be a good match because we think cottages and funky decorating seem somehow to go together.

Cheese and Random Ferments!

Drum roll, Please!!!! Today we are rolling out a new blog...Cheese and Random Ferments. After The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses was published last June, we thought our cheese journey would be essentially complete. Wrong!

We keep meeting new cheesemakers, finding new cheesemongers, trying new cheeses, learning new ways that America's cheese revolution is contributing to, and building on, new food attitudes among Americans. Until it is time for a second edition of the book, or a new book, we are sharing these people, places, and discoveries on Cheese and Random Ferments.

What fun it has been to get started. We are eager to hear your reactions to the posts...and to the design (colors, text size, placement of links, tone of voice) of the blog.

As it turns out there are some stories fermenting in our lives that are not about cheese. Those are the "random ferments" referred to in the blog's title. We love them too, and so have given them their own sub-blog called Random Ferments. It is easy to link from any of our four blogs to the others. Comments are more than welcome, they are eagerly sought!

Seafood Festival 2010 in Cedar Key

Pam and James came for Seafood Festival and the weekend. Great fun. We went to the Neptune Bar for the live music Friday and sang along with "We Love This Bar," the favorite of the audience. We helped set up the tent for the Friends of the Refuges booth and volunteered there for a bit. We bought cool craft offerings from the vendors.We hiked the Dennis Creek Trail and took a Tidewater Tour to the Suwannee River. Best of all, we sat on the breezeway and enjoyed the beautiful evening weather and good company.

Celebrating with Aunt Pat

I had a wonderful visit with Aunt Pat for her 90th birthday celebration. She and I and Carol hung out in Dallas for a few days, then rode with Karen and Vic to Ellen's in Austin for a super party, featuring Trent's brisket (cooked outdoors for 12 hours), and a groaning board of other delightful foods, plus 16mm movies in the backyard after dark.

Aunt Pat, Ellen and Trent, and Karen and Vic's son Tony (in his party hat) are in the photo below. At he bottom is a photo of the a part of the back yard in its party attire.

Kayaking to Atsena Otie

Russ and I joined about 20 people for the Hidden Coast Paddling Week kayak trip to the island of Atsena Otie. It is a 2.7 mile paddle. We started on the beach in Cedar Key, paddled over choppy waters to the beach on the island and took a break to swim (me...too many mosquitoes inland for me) or hike (most of the other folks) and have a little picnic time. Then we paddled around the island and back through even choppier waters to Cedar Key. As you might imagine, we waited to take pictures until we were past the waves and safely near shore, in the flat water. 


Atsena Otie is the original site of the town of Cedar Key. When the town was washed away by a hurricane in the 1890s, it was rebuilt in its current location on an island closer to the mainland. The day was sunny and lovely...and wore us out! There have been other paddling events all this week on the Suwannee River and various creeks. Maybe next year we'll do more than one day.

Hoh River Trail in the Sunny Rain Forest

My definition of an awesome day might be: Sunny, 60s for hiking, blue sky, puffy clouds, snow capped mountains in the distance, not too steep hills along the trail. Bingo.

Today we drove to the Hoh Rain Forest, and it did not rain. Perfect weather. Fantastic trail. We hiked a bit more than 6 miles after having stopped at Kalaloch Lodge for wonderful brunch. The first photo is at Kalaloch, on a cliff over the beach/shore. The rest are along the trail at sunny Hoh Rain Forest.

Lake Quinault, the Temporate Rain Forest, and Ruby Beach

Wednesday was a travel day. We drove south past the clouded and invisible Mt St Helen's, west along the Columbia River Valley, and north to the Olympic Peninsula National Forest and Park. We passed through Hoquiam, and former lumbering town. We have never seen a more boarded up, desperate looking town. It was an amazing sight.

We are staying at the Lake Quinault Lodge. The lake is 10-15,000 years old, formed by a 1,000 foot high glacier. Thursday we hiked about 8 miles in the Temperate Rain forest...in the sunshine! Friday we hiked about 5 miles along a couple of stretches of the ocean shore line. Hard walking there, for sure, but beautiful!

Mt. Rainier

Tuesday

The rain had not yet begun when we woke up at 7:00 and we had another great view of the snow-capped Mt. Rainier out our window. We donned our backpacks and headed out to grab a bit of the forecast-to-be-awful day. We hiked about 4 miles of the Wonderland Trail, through Fir, hemlock, and cedar again. The aromas of the woods were almost the best part. But the amazing numbers of fallen trees were also surprising. They must take forever to rot because there were tree trunks all around us that were so big that three people could not have hugged them finger-tip to finger-tip. It showered enough that we wore our raingear, but not enough that the rain dribbled onto our pant legs. A fantastic morning outing.

While I was doing laundry…the Inn had free washers and dryers for guests…an employee came in to do his wash. Jason is working here for 4 months to help fund his university tuition in Jamaica. He bought The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses! I was fun to sign his copy and tell him to tell his mother for me that she’d taught him well how to do his own laundry.

The rain finally came in heavily. It has been a steady downpour since noon. People have been filtering in who are hiking the long trails. They are eager to not spend the night in tents. Wet backpacks are everywhere. People are sharing rooms with strangers to avoid the night outdoors. Having shared bathrooms and showers seems not even a hardship compared to their arrangements!

Wednesday we headed for the Olympic National Park. We'll report on that next.

The Festival of Cheeses, Mt. Rainier's Longmire and Paradise Trails

The Festival of Cheeses was amazing as always. We went to the awards ceremony this year…the first time for us. It was held in the Symphony Hall in Seattle and the Festival followed in the lobby areas. I especially enjoyed seeing the awards announced after having volunteered during the judging. The crowd applauded robustly. One of our favorites from The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses…Kunik, from Nettle Meadows Goat Farm and Creamery…won in its category. The Best in Show was won by Uplands Pleasant Ridge Reserve, made by a cheesemaker couple everyone admires. It was touching to see them receive the plaudits.

Off to the Wilderness

Now that the conference is over, we are off to the wilderness. The drive was not too hard, about 3 hours. The last hour was rural, although the rest was through suburbia.

We stayed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning at the National Park Inn in Mt. Rainier National Park. There are no cell towers, so we will be delayed in posting this until we emerge again into civilization. The lodge was built in the 1930s and has not changed much. There is a lovely living room with a big fireplace. Our room is modest in size and amenities…but large enough for two happy campers to sip some wine and chill out before our dinner downstairs.  The bathrooms are shared…both the men’s and women’s are down the hall with a couple of stalls each. There are only 2 showers for all the rooms. They did give us big plush robes to wear and slippers too. We will probably tolerate being a bit dirtier than usual. Russ is recording a description which I’ll post if I can figure out how to do that with our new laptop.

Our lodge is about 10 miles into the park. On Sunday, when we arrived via rental car that we picked up at the Seattle airport, we had lunch here and then drove in about 15 more miles to another area with a lodge, Paradise Inn. That lodge is much larger and we are happy with our cozy one. We took a great hike in the Paradise area. It was in the 40s and cloudy…quite high elevation. The wildflowers are spectacular. We also saw an elk, a fox, a Clark’s nuthatch (big as a jay), a family of quail-like birds (Ptarmigans?) we haven’t yet identified, and a marmot. I’ll post a few photos. We got our hiking feet under us, with about a 4 mile up and down…good practice for Florida flatlanders. We hope to hike a lot Monday and Tuesday, but rain is threatened. 

Monday at Mt Rainier

Despite promised clouds and showers, the morning was spectacular. We awoke to a view of the volcano out our window. The shared showers had no waiting line and we hit the trails pretty early. Unlike Sunday afternoon, we had our backpacks and walking sticks this time, thank goodness because we picked another steep trail. No meadows today, huge tall trees climbing straight up a mountain side with us. Really beautiful. The sun stayed with us. Temperatures was in the low 50s. We hiked about 2 miles up in about 2 hours and then back down in about 1.5 more. Going up we sweated and breathed a lot; going down we wore jackets against hypothermia and our knees complained a bit. All in all, it was great. We were back only a short while before the clouds came in and showers started.