This past weekend Kelli and I had the privilege of being invited up to West Glacier for the wedding of a family friend of Kelli's. We couldn't have asked for a better way to spend our Memorial Day weekend! Kelli's dad Dan had booked one of the cabins where the rest of the wedding party was staying and when we arrived on Saturday afternoon it felt like one big family reunion. There were 5 total cabins at the lodge and we had them all to ourselves! Over the years I have become close with all of these friends of the Dobson's as well and many of them we haven't seen in a very long time, like since our own wedding!
Saturday evening we went back into Kalispell and enjoyed dinner followed by church with some good friends of ours from our time in the Flathead, the Vullertson's. We quickly realized their two kids are no different than any others we know and they are growing like weeds! Our time with them was fantastic as it always is and we capped it off by stopping for ice cream on our way out of town!
The wedding was Sunday afternoon and since we had a little time to kill in the morning and we were so close I told Kelli I wanted to drive up to Hungry Horse dam. I'd never been there in all the time I've spent in the area and since it is one of this countries engineering marvels I couldn't pass up the opportunity to check it out. Within a matter of minutes word spread through our camp that we were going up and seven of us decided to go. I could go on for hours about the magnitude of the dam and the fascinating process that it took to construct it, but I'll spare you the details and just tell you if you haven't been there and are in the area you must check it out for yourself!
After viewing the dam we came back to the cabins and simply relaxed! I feel like I give myself a fair amount of relaxation time while at home but I can tell you when your on vacation like this and take some time to simply enjoy a cup of coffee on the front porch while looking at the mountains with absolutely no agenda, you realize what true relaxation is. People often say that relaxing is good for the soul, I don't see how anyone could ever argue this as after simply siting on the porch for a coupe hours I felt completely rejuvenated!
The wedding ceremony was beautiful! It was held at the Lake McDonald Lodge just inside Glacier National Parks West entrance. The ceremony was right at the waters edge next to where a creek, bursting at it's seams with spring run off, poured into the glass like surface of the lake. The groom and his family are native American so they closed the ceremony with their tribes dove song which was amazing!
After the reception, and way too much sugar for this guy, we headed back to the cabins for more relaxing:) Dan and Donna rested in the cabin while Kelli and I decided to go for a hike before the sun went down. All of the really good trails were too far away to make it before dark so we ended up just going for a walk through the town of West Glacier. Our journey came to an end when our asphalt stopped at a bridge over the Flathead river. We walked over to the sign on the other side of the bridge and read that it was the Belton bridge. This bridge was the only way into this end of the park for many years. During the flood of 1964 the bridge was completely submerged in water leaving those who lived on the North side of the river detached from needed supplies. Somehow when the water receded the concrete arch of the bridge remained intact! Locals quickly rebuilt the bridge on top of the old concrete base and it's still there, serving as a constant reminder of just how well things were built in the good old days!
We snapped a few photos of the bridge then headed back to join the rest of the crew for dinner and some socializing on our last night together. Of course like most family reunions we had our share of excitement, one of the brides cousins and I went to light up some sparklers late in the night and somehow his flared up in his hand, burning three of his fingers pretty badly! We had a few nurses at the cabins so they assessed the situation and quickly realized he needed medical attention. The closest hospital was in Kalispell, 30 miles away, and the only people who knew how to get there were Kelli and I and the bride and groom. I didn't feel like taking your cousin to the ER on your wedding night sounded like very much fun so I volunteered to ride along with the cousin and his dad for directions. Everything went good at the hospital, they put on some burn cream and bandaged him all up, then on the way back to the cabins we got a speeding ticket going through Columbia Falls! The local cop took it easy on our driver, only giving him a $20 ticket for going almost 20 over the limit, and we finally got back to the cabin around 2am!
Everyone got up at their own pace the following morning and we all headed our separate ways. Even with the ER scare on Sunday night, we had an amazing time and arrived home thoroughly refreshed and relaxed, just in time to make it over to my parents for a Memorial Day BBQ! As we settled into our own bed that night I couldn't help but thank God for what I consider to be a perfect weekend!
Remember, there's no such thing as too much relaxation!
With each day that passes in our new house we become more and more fond of our neighborhood as well as the people who live in it. We often find ourselves telling each other, usually after a walk, how we can't get over how special it is. I think in just over a month we've already taken the dogs for a walk more than we have in any other neighborhood we've been in! With all the positives of our neighborhood though there still were some questions we had about some of the neighbors, mostly our next door neighbor who we haven't seen leave the house.
All of our questions were answered yesterday as while returning from a walk with the dogs we got to meet the most important lady in the neighborhood, Irene. She lives across the street and a few houses down and she is just the person we needed to meet to find out anything we needed to know, whether it was about neighbors, pets, or kids, Irene had the answer! Every neighborhood has that little old lady who seems to know every ones dirty little secrets and we just met ours.
I always get a kick out of neighbors like her because they have a very good way of reminding us just how small this world is we live in! When Kelli and I moved over here we came from a town we considered a city with 45,000 people, to a real city with a lot more! People like Irene always remind us that no matter how big this town is it's still a small world, and many of our communities are still very tightly knit.
This has been proven in a very tragic way this week in the town of Moore, Oklahoma. A devastating tornado swept through there on Monday afternoon taking many lives with it and leaving a massive path of destruction! All of the news there is coverage of catastrophe and among all of the stories of tragedy there is one common positive theme, good ol fashioned neighborly support! I know at times it seems as though this is a lost art, but if you've watched the news at all you've seen one of the best examples of it you ever will! Our thoughts and prayers have been with those affected by the disaster in OK and we know that through neighborly support and determination they will rebuild and recover from the events that have brought their town to it's knees temporarily.
Remember, be kind and courteous to your neighbors as you just never know when you may need their support!
We have lived in our new house up here on the south hill for just over a month now and the lacking of updated posts to this blog are a pretty good indicator of what we've been up to in that time! We didn't get much time to put off projects after moving in as our insurance company required us to install handrails around the stairs in the front and back of the house. After researching wrought iron and a few other options we decided to think outside the box a bit and fabricate them out of black iron piping. Thanks to running miles of this material in my former career, this project went really well! We were so excited about the results of it that we immediately jumped right into more!
The next challenge we tackled was the dilapidated tile in front of our fireplace. This project could have easily been put off until this fall but we came across a screaming deal on the tile we wanted to use at our local Habitat for Humanity Restore. Since neither one of us had tiled anything before we were slightly apprehensive to get started but much like any project we start on our house, once you get started your committed! Although the tile took much more effort to remove than we expected, the rest of the project went pretty well and turned out good.
So feeling pretty good about the first two, we upped our game and tackled a ground level deck in the corner of our back yard. I figured with the early success form the first two projects combined with me having built a couple decks before, this one would go just as good. I was wrong! The framing portion of the project went pretty well but when I went to start putting decking boards down I quickly found out that I punched some numbers majorly wrong on my materials estimate as we only had enough decking boards to cover about a third of the space! So I called around and found a discount lumber yard who had decking boards for about $3 less a board than Home Depot or Lowes. We refigured the numbers and picked up the rest of our material and quickly finished putting it all together. Now the hard part! We had decided earlier to use a deck covering called Restore which is supposed to be basically like rhino lining for a deck. It seemed like the perfect solution for minimal maintenance but we soon found out that we didn't have enough to finish covering! So the next day I made another trip to Home Depot and picked up another box of Restore only to have the guy working the paint counter to tell me that Behr makes a product that works much better cause it covers more area! I gave the guy my best "would have been nice to know yesterday" look and came home and finished the deck. All totaled the deck took 7 days and went $250 over our estimated budget! Needless to say our big projects have come to a screeching halt for a little while:)
It hasn't been all work and no play however since moving in as I've been helping with Tatums t-ball team every week. As you can imagine it's been quite entertaining each week getting to know her teammates and watching them have fun! I am always fascinated by how quickly their attention can be diverted, from things as interesting as a kite being flown in the park next to the game, to as simple as the dirt underneath their little feet, there always seems to be something to distract them. It has been a blast so far and were only half way through the season! I only wonder how many of the kids will be just as excited about t-ball in four weeks as they are now:)
Remember, the house projects will come and go, the time spent with those that you love is what will be with you always!
