We love the mountains...

We just returned from an 2.5 week vacation out west. The trip started with the girls and I flying to OR. It takes an entire day to make it across the country but the girls were great little travelers. We spent the first week hanging out at my parents house and enjoyed spending time with them along with 3 of my 5 brothers and their families and my grandparents. There were 9 of the 10 cousins there (all 5 or under) so the girls had a blast with so many friends to play with. They loved playing at the indoor water park and going to the playground with their cousins. On our way home from the water park Dad took a corner a little fast and the two year olds piped up with some backseat driving commentary "Papa, car fast". It was pretty funny to hear what they had to say about it. I was also floored because it was the first time Maren spoke putting two ideas together.

The highlight of every night was going in the hot tub with Papa-san.

At the end of the week I left the girls there and headed to CA to visit a friend for two days where we enjoyed a morning without kids going to the gym, having lunch, and getting pampered with the ultimate pedicures. After that I headed onto Reno/Lake Tahoe tomeet up with Jim. The girls had a blast being spoiled rotten while I was gone. They had the undivided attention of two sets of grandparents for a few days and got to go on adventures to Chuck E. Cheese, the water park, and a few others. Jim had a conference at a nice hotel at the base of Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe for a week. The conference was scheduled for the mornings and evenings leaving the day free to enjoy the slopes. We lucked out and had a minimum of 6 inches of fresh snow everyday. It was great to be able to do some fun "steep and deep" powder skiing and enjoy some time without kids.

(Not the best pic, but we wanted to get one to show our son that we taught him to be a good skier in utero!)

I took two of the five days off from skiing and enjoyed some time relaxing, snowshoeing and playing some hard core disc golf (see previous post).

While in the area Jim also did some preliminary job interviews with the local groups as that is one of the areas we're looking at moving to in the next few years. We also spent some time looking at housing and checking out the local area. I headed back to OR across some snowy roads in time to repack suitcases and head out early the next day to fly home. I think one of the things we realized from this trip is how much we miss being close to the mountains.