A Very Belated 2023 Recap

I guess I took a bit of a blogging break. I only blogged three times last year and this will be my first post so far this year. I just haven’t been in the mood but now suddenly I am. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Where to even begin? A lot has happened since I last blogged. The girls are about to turn 16, have jobs and are on the verge of getting their driver’s licenses. We took an amazing trip to Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell and Las Vegas last summer. We celebrated our 17th anniversary and are closing in on our 18th. We attended some great concerts, did some fun hikes and have had lots of fun date nights, game nights and girl’s/guy’s nights out. Ok, I guess that’s not all that much but whatever. So, I guess to start off my 2024 blogging, I will recap 2023:

I turned 54 in January.

For President's Day weekend we went to Crescent Bar and from there Paul and Kayley went skiing at Mission Ridge and we all took a day trip to Leavenworth.

On February 28th, the girls turned 15 and we took them and a few friends to the Melting Pot.

In April, Paul and I saw the band TOTO at the Snoqualmie Casino. It was so awesome to hear "Africa" live (one of my absolute ALL-TIME favorite songs).

In June we took our annual Nelson Family Vacation to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park. We actually flew in the Las Vegas and spent a few nights at the Excalibur and then rented a car and drove up to St. George, Utah, where we stayed for a week at WorldMark and did day trips from there. But I am going to do a separate post about that trip so enough about that for now.

For the 4th of July it has become our new tradition to go to Paul's cousin's house. He lives on the water near Poulsbo so we can go out in canoes or paddleboards, and we have a big bbq dinner (salmon this time) and then some people stay for fireworks but we always come home and go to our neighborhood's fireworks show.

Sometime over the summer we visited the tree that was planted at Crescent Bar in honor of Paul's dad and spread his remaining ashes around it (the rest were spread in the river in 2022).

In early September Paul and I did a lovely hike at Mount Rainier National Park

In November we went to another concert with some friends, Night Ranger! Night Ranger was the first rock concert I ever went to back in 1985 so it was really cool to see them again all these years later, with one of the friends that I originally went with.