To Grandma's house we go.... Part one

A couple of weeks ago my two dogs, Bug and I took a trip to see my mom. She turned sixty this month and we hadn't gone to visit her in two years so I felt compelled to make the long trip. It's an eight hour drive to get there. Sometimes longer when you are traveling with two of these:

And one of these:

We live in the same state but at opposite ends of it. Our landscapes are quite different and we saw so much as we wound our way over three separate mountain passes to get to grandma's. Snow in the mountains and hot sun in the high desert. We passed through forests, crossed wild rivers, wound through deep crevasses that rushing waters cut into the mountains trying to make their way to the ocean. I seem to remember some of those things, but what I remember the most is... Dog breath.

And a whining child demanding that a new movie be put into the DVD player every hour and a half. When we finally crested the hill and could see the beautiful valley that is home to grandma Rosie we all cried out "Hooray" in excitement, or possibly exhaustion and exasperation.

My mom and her partner own eighty acres in a beautiful little valley that is surrounded by mountains on one side and rolling hills on the other.

The mountains have forests and the hills have sage brush and wild flowers.

It's so pretty in the spring and early summer, if only the winter wasn't hellish with snow for months and months at a time.

It's those hellish winter months that make my mom want to run far, far away from this place. That and the fifty mile drive to go grocery shopping in a town that doesn't even have a Target. It's at least two or more hours to Target, I'm really not sure how she survives.

We had a lovely time, in spite of the colder than normal temperatures.
On the first full day there she took us to the river that separates our state from the next.

The gravel road that runs along our states side has a very old and small tunnel that you have to go through in order to get to the best picnic spots.

After we found a good spot and got out, we quickly realized it was too windy and too cold to hang out for very long.

Bug wanted to stay and pretend fish with a big stick he found on the shore.

But we left pretty quickly after getting some pictures and rounding up four unruly dogs and a five year old.

If only it had been warmer, on our last visit we were able to go swimming in this river.

On the second full day we took a trip to the big town. My mom has been taking some college courses at the local community college and had to take her final. While we waited for her to finish, I took Bug to a local park. Just as we were getting ready to leave we spotted two squirrels by our car. Bug got out the rest of his morning muffin and threw them a piece as I took pictures.

One of them ran away while the other picked up as much muffin as he could. Then he ran it up a tree to share with the other one!

Stay tuned for part two when we walk the irrigation ditches.