her lovely nest.: bidding our Portland summer adieu.

it's mid-August here in Portland Oregon and my thoughts are inexorably turning to my all time favorite season, Fall.

but I can't do that till I bid summer a proper goodbye...

here in the Pacific Northwest, we're so lucky to have a gorgeous forest playground just 1 hour away, high in the Cascades.

[incomparable Mt. Hood, view from Timberline Lodge].

huh. while I'm super pleased with my picture of Mt. Hood, it sure doesn't look very tall! but it's over 11,000 feet. must've been my angle...

but I digress. wasn't I talking about summer and how lucky we are?
and we felt doubly lucky this summer because two of our cool nieces came to visit, one for a week and one for a whole month!

now I should start by saying that these girls don't necessarily love being dragged all over the place...so naturally the first thing we did was pile everyone in the car and drag them out to Skibowl at Mt. Hood for some summer fun. oops, sorry girls.

while there's tons to do at Skibowl, I am particularly obsessed with the Alpine Slide.

secretly, that's exactly where I planned to spend the entire 4 hours of our 1/2 day pass...thanks to my wonderfully accommodating husband and nieces that's precisely what we did!

[the ride to the top of the slide].

armed with our paid wristbands, we rushed to the chair lift that would whisk us to the top of the 1/2 mile long dual-track slide. according to the Skibowl description, the toboggans reach speeds of 20-37MPH as they careen downhill, dropping 350 feet over the course of the track.

I'm sure I hit that 37MPH, speed junky that I am.

[the track winds downhill past gorgeous trees and ferns].

immediately upon reaching the bottom, we hustled back onto the chair lifts to do it all over again.

and again. for 4 hours.

it was heaven!

near the end of the day we rode the chair lift up higher, past the slide and up to the hiking and mountain biking path. we took a leisurely walk back down, passing the Historic Warming Hut, built around the same time period as Timberline Lodge [the Lodge was built during the late 1930s as part of President Roosevelt's Work Progress Administration].

[historic warming hut with Mt. Hood in the background].

since you can't be this close to Mt. Hood without visiting Timberline Lodge, that was our next stop.

while we didn't hike due to our extreme laziness, I did snap a great picture of the trail signs and lovely flowers! not to mention the shot of the incomparable mountain itself [see it in all it's glory at the top of this post!].

[hiking trails at Timberline].

we sprawled on the Lodge's back patio and drank their famous hot chocolate.

in July. yes of course. it *is* Oregon after all.

there were skiers coming in and out of the Lodge while we were there.

in July. yes! you can see the snow still at the top of the mountain in my first picture.