Yep!!! For all you Hot Californians!) We've got snow in Washington, just 2 hrs away (in October!). We'll be getting some cold white stuff soon too!)

Mom and Dad enjoyed the snow, been awhile since they'd seen snow, coming from South Carolina!

I love this pic!

We took a trip to Winthrop, Wa, another place you've gotta check off the list! It's a westernized town, like you could just ride your horse up to the store and tie it up to the hitchin post outside the shops! It's a gorgeous drive there! See what the rest of the US is missing out on!?!

We've got color in Washington!!!! For all you California people who got it all!!!!!!

We had to go to Deception Pass, it's one of those places you just have to see and check off your list of places you've been.

We visited the Samish lookout, or Bullard Hill? Anyway, it overlooks the Skagit Valley where we live.

Molly was excited to actually be able to pick an apple from a tree, guess they don't have apple trees just anywhere!

Nathan & Molly at one of the apple orchards of the valley.

We visited the Olympic Game Farm! We were very up close to these wild but domesticated animals! Most of them are retired hollywood stars!

We saw sheep, yak, lamas, goats, bunnies, wolves, cougars, lions, zebras, buffalo, elk, reindeer, prairie dogs, bald eagles, a rhino, tigers, chickens, roosters, and sea gulls!

We drove among these free ranging animals! Don't stop the car or you'll get a few dents from this guy wanting more bread!

I totally loved being this close to a zebra! I think they're such cool animals! Are they white with black stripes or black with white stripes? I love the sounds they make, so different from a horse! It was neat to feed them from the car window!

Above all, the bears were the coolest! We got them to stand for us and wave! It was so exciting to see such a large animal perform! They were even "cheesing" for us! Makes you just wanna run over and squeeze the big teddy bears!!!!

We surprised Ruthie with a belated birthday party!

Sisters like to goof off!

Mom shows off her handiwork! Table runners for the girls!

Yummmmmmyyyyy! A family tradition started in Switzerland, cheese fondue! Since it was cold in Switzerland when we'd eat it, it's become a winter tradition in our family! Cold weather and cheese fondue just go hand in hand!

We did a lot of eating, baking and preparing for the family reunion dinner, we had a fullfledged Thanksgiving Dinner in October! Mom and I even wondered that there were so many people driving around town on a holiday! It really felt like Thanksgiving!

Making our famous "hamburger cookies"

I think this dough has been in the fridge long enough!

Mom, making her famous gingerbread

And. . . . . . you guessed it, we had a lot of laughs!

Uncle Charlie and all the kids!

The newly weds of the Enebrad clan, Nathan & Molly

The Enebrad girls

We met up with the NW Enebrads in Leavenworth for the day.

Enebrad Family (minus Charlie)

Wow, so a lot has happened since I last uploaded some pictures! If you've scrolled down through the pics, you'll have an understanding of what I mean! We had a great little family reunion, and though Charlie and his family couldn't be there for THE reunion "dinner", we got to meet up with them a few times before he took off again!

23lb King 15lb Chum from Vedder river BC 11OCT08

All Boy! They loved climbing on the tractors!

Watch out! Stay off the road, here comes Avery!

Just one more visit to the Farm!

We had to come back to the Golden Glen Creamery to get some more free icecream! Well actually that probably had something to do with us coming back to the same farm, but I missed out on the creamery visit due to work on Saturday. So, we paid them a visit again on Sunday afternoon and brought the cousins along.

We met lots of cows, mostly milk cows! (imagine that?!) The farmers had special huts or "dog houses" for the calves. There were only three calves this year.

Usually, Mt Baker can be seen from this view of the farm, but we were having a "grey day" in the Skagit Valley. We get a lot of "grey days" during the season changes, but fall has got to be the prettiest of the season for this area!

Yummy! This was Cameron's favorite part! Free icecream!

The guy here is just cleaning off the butter churner as it turns. Right now the "butter" to be is half n half and the consistency of yougart. It will need to churn a lot longer.

Austin and Cameron search for hidden treasures in the hay. Cameron is trying to do it one-handed so not to get more "flavor" in his icecream!

Salt lick anyone?!

Cameron gets a kiss from the cow! This cow was very social, but I think he was really wanting a salt lick!

The cow thought Jason was a salt lick! Whenever he was petted, he'd slurp out that big long tongue and take a lick!

We found another very social calf, it was so soft and loved people petting him. He kept trying to suck on Austin's shirt! Austin had to change his shirt after that!

Austin (cousin) tries his hand at milking "Squirty Gerty" the cow! It's harder than you think!

We got in on a free hayride, a tour of the farm grounds. Besides dairy products, this farm also harvests hay and corn. This year's corn crop will only yield an estimated 60% due to the long winter we had last year and the limited amount of dry weather in the seasons that followed.

The boys goof off, I think it was all the sugar from the free icecream that they were "tanked" up on. They were pretending to be pigs!

Follow us on our Festival of Family Farms Tour!

Today we set out on a family adventure. Our valley has the family farm festival once a year in October and it's an event we try to make. We set out to tour as many farms as time would allow, so let me take you on a tour of the places we visited today!

We visited the Taylor Family Shellfish Farm first. We got to sample some shellfish, play with critters and even have a crab race. We really enjoyed this unique type of farm!

Here are some ways they catch the crabs. . . .

The boys inspect the oyster harvesting machine. There are lots of oyster beds in the bay and the shellfish farmers harvest them much like a produce farmer brings in his harvest! We've hiked up the mountain behind this farm and can plainly see the oyster beds from up above. It looks like a regular dirt farm! The tide was in and high, so we couldn't see the "farm".

The Oyster farmers are busy at work and making samples for everyone to try. The guy to the left is busy shucking live oysters for people to eat, raw with a squirt of lemon! I prefer it cooked!!!

The crabs stay in these tanks until they're sold I guess! One is trying to escape, we were cheering him on!

Free Samples!!!!

Oysters on the barbie! Free samples! Yeah Mom, they really were free! I checked! (inside joke!)
Daniel tries some clams and bbq'ed oyster, he liked them too.
My mister "I'll eat anything" didn't like it too much!
Yes, I actually gave it a whirl! Brought me back to the days when we'd sit around the kitchen table after church and help Daddy eat his sardines and smoked oysters from the can. I don't know that we really liked it, but it was a way to be "cool" with Dad! The clams and oyster weren't that bad, you just have to close your eyes before taking a bite! Don't look to long at it, you might not ever try it!

There's my handsome man! Daniel is such a sweet boy and a great big brother to Cameron. He's a huge blessing to me! If all boys were like him, I think I'd have a bunch!

This lighthouse is the world's only lighthouse made of oyster shells, so they claim, here at the Taylor family oyster farm.

This weird "creature" this girl is holding is a "gooey duck", it's got a clam-like shell at the base and the top of it is a siphon for sand and water! God sure has an imagination!

Cameron finally gets brave enough to handle a critter. I think the crab in the tank was a minor deterrent for a little while!

This is a sea cucumber! It felt like jello! Look at Cameron's face! For once, my "hands on" kinda guy was playin it safe!

We were handling the sunflower starfish. We learned how starfish eat! Ready? Well, . . . . . . they actually push their stomachs out from the bottom center and sort of engulf the food they are intending on eating and pulling back inside themselves! So they use the outside of their stomachs! Wild!

Daniel plays with a sand dollar. He was wondering what it was at first because it didn't look like the bleached sand dollars he was used to seeing in stores!

The boys had a great time with the crab races. They picked out a crab from the big tanks with the help of a worker and then put them behind the red flaps to get ready for the race. They sounded a buzzer and opened the gates, off the crabs went. . . . well, some of them!

The boys had to beat the wooden bins to make a lot of noise and vibration for the crab to "run it's race". The boys' crab just wanted to hang out!

Cameron gets an up close view of the crab.