Ruthlessly Pillaged

I've snagged some of the photos taken by iPhone this year from my David's Facebook page. What's his is mine, right?

First up is the coffee cart stop of our Third Wave Coffee Tour in Portland. I discovered on this trip that Portland is my spiritual home.

That's Lora there in the middle checking her phone. I can't remember the name of the cart (memory like a sieve, me) but they were the ones who provided us coffee with that lemon/rosemary/Douglas Fir syrup, the latter of which was sourced from their own yard. They also had a great pay-it-forward system - you can "sponsor" a free cup of coffee for someone in the future. You pay for it, it's marked  up on a blackboard, and anyone who comes along, feels the need for a cuppa, but is short of cash, can take it up. Very cool.

In Kelowna, David was there to speak at their "campmeeting" held in the local school, and we were tickled to find this when we arrived.

The Okanagan is beautiful, as I said before. This is a view of the lake from the local lavender farm Lori-Anne took us to while we were there.

Unfortunately the farm itself didn't open for another week but the shop/tearoom was open and we spent a ridiculous amount of money on lavender-related goodness, and had hand-blended tea on the back verandah.

The elegant and charming Lori-Anne is on the right, in an Audrey Hepburn-esque turtleneck, and the adorable cheeky monkey Amelie is making eyes at us at the front. Oliver was off doing whatever small boys do when the grown ups are being boring.

David and I drove along the lake and a short visit to the beach, where a few of those crazy Okanagans were sunbathing and swimming. David took the first picture of me in a very long time that I actually really like.

While in Canada we also discovered the awesomeness that is...deep fried pickles. How did I not know about this? Why has no one told me?!!!

We had them twice. It's just as well we weren't there for longer, really.

On the food-related theme, we were in Australia on my birthday and David's brother Geoffrey took us on a drive to Byron Bay, where we had lunch at what he said had been rated the 2nd best place to eat in town. Imagine our surprise when it turned out to be a cafe attached to the local Adventist church.

Manna Haven is a vegan restaurant with really, really good food (sadly, often not the case at vegan places) and a hot mint-carob drink that David could have and, despite my long-standing bias against carob, would have fooled me into thinking it was chocolate if I hadn't known otherwise.

Geoff oldest son, William, wasn't feeling well and didn't come along, but his wife Anne and Ben, the youngest, in all his curly-headed-Trim glory, were there to help me celebrate heading into the back stretch of my 40s.

Although still suffering from the colds we came down with the moment we arrived, we had a really good day. And despite being winter, the weather while we were in Australia was perfect - hovering around 70F most of the time.

I'm including the photo below because it's funny, and because I think I look surprisingly cute with a hard-hat. We went on a tour of the new section of the Sydney Adventist Hospital, which is a building site, so everyone had to wear hard-hats and day-glo vests. (David has several pictures of senior church officials looking silly in hard-hats and safety vests, but I will not be posting them here, to preserve their dignity.)

I rocked the hat, not so much the vest.

Next time I'll show pictures of the Victorian extravaganza that is Ferndale, CA, and my souvenir yarn.

Wendy