Hurray For Year Old Cake

Here it is, and yes it is nearly half gone! No thanks to Laura though!!! She hasn't deemed the cake 'good' enough to eat so I have been having some cake and ice cream the past few nights. Oh, I forgot to mention, this is our wedding cake from June 24, 2005 - it's been frozen for the past year. Anyway, I havn't had any trouble eatting it, but then again Laura calls me a garbage disposal because I eat just about anything - like it or not. Notice that the cake is on our countertop, otherwise known to most as a washing machine.

Saturday evening we went to a resturant in downtown Missoula. It was not exactly my type of resturant. $18 for my meal was more than I cared to pay, but I guess that's why we save our money all year and buy the cheap food at Wal-Mart too. Anyway, I had the Roasted Red Pepper Canilloni which looked like, in my honest opinion, two burritos covered in orange bailing twine. The taste was a little better, but I would have prefered unlimited refills of Mt. Dew and an all you can eat buffet. In which case I would have ate until I was sick and been quite satisfied.

I am getting ahead of myself and now I am going to really mess up the chronilogical order of the weekend by telling about our Saturday morning/afternoon drive. For our anniversary we decided we wanted to take a short trip and do some geocaching. So we planned out what seemed to be a remote road with a few geocaches near the road. I decided to take a new way over the mountains via some old logging roads and then the fun began. We took a few wrong turns somewhere along the way - the roads are not marked - and we found ourselves dodging rocks on the road and then suddenly the road ended and we were looking over a cliff... That's when we decided we must have gone the wrong way. Here's a picture of the area we stopped at, notice the nice little rock in the middle of the road. The view was terrific and well worth getting lost to find it, but Laura was a little more worried about going over the edge of the road - which I will give her credit for, it was a easily a few hundred, if not near one thousand feet to the bottom. She likes to worry about things like that though, two years ago when we were near Yellowstone we started up a VERY steep slope and Laura decided to stop half way up because she was affraid the car might tip over backwards.... I will give you a moment to laugh before continuing our trip..

So we finally made it back to the 'main' logging road and found ourselves only 20 miles from home, but we had already driven 50 miles. We continued on our trip and thought we would travel the next 90 miles in about two hours - turns out the speed limit for the ENTIRE 90 miles is 30 mph and that's if road conditions warrant. I found myself doing 45 for a short time, and wouldn't you know it, a police officer was hiding under the shade of a big tree. He flashed his lights as I approached and waved me past, but he pointed out the speed limit sign as I drove by - to which I gave a thankful wave and continued on down the road. Granted, this was at the very beginning of the road and the speed limit sign had not been seen for awhile - so, seeing how we are in Montana and there practically isn't a speed limit, I felt 45 was appropriate.

Anyway, turns out our remote drive was actually along one of the most famous fishing rivers in the Pacific Northwest and people were crawling everywhere for the next 60 miles. We picked up a hitch-hiker who was dropping off his truck downriver and needed a ride 15 miles back up-stream to his raft. At 20-25 miles an hour it made for a long ride because the guy was a talker, and talk he did. After dropping him off and wishing him well on his rafting/fishing trip we continued down the 'highway' - here's a picture of what our highway looked like. This was taken on the Skalkaho Pass summet at 7,200 feet. You can see the road is just packed dirt/rock and it is basically a single lane road.

However, as we drove down the pass we stopped to see a very nice waterfall and find a cache next to it. There were enough people around the falls to keep us from getting too close - lets just say that they appeared to be of a different social class which is commonly known as hillbilly or redneck and we felt our presence in the area was not needed.

We managed to find four caches for all the driving we did - nearly 200 miles in all, and it took us over 7 hours after a police detour which took 45 minutes. After 12 hours in the car last weekend we didn't exatly want a 7 hour car ride this weekend, but now we can say we have been there and done that.

Sunday we spent most of the day around the house. We mostly cleaned and got things ready for the arrival of Andy and Amber who are expected to be here sometime tomorrow. We did go find a few more geocaches in the evening on a nice walk. This evening Laura and I placed a cache in the park next to our house and painted some more containers for additional caches in the future. Temperatures were in the 90's today and are expected to be even warmer tomorrow. It's nice to have the warmer temperatures but it makes work a rather miserable place to be when I am wearing pants and out in the sun.

With that I should go find myself some cake and ice cream before the news and then make my way to bed. We have started work at 7:30 to try to beat the heat by a few more minutes and that means waking up earlier as well. Until again

-=Nolan=-