Autumn is our favorite season. It's why Amelia's middle name is autumn. And this autumn has been one of the best I can remember. It has been the most Autumn of all the Autumns I can remember.
I remember a night, a little over a month ago, when I poked my head outside in the early evening. Autumn, at least around here, always had a distinct smell. I remember thinking “oh that is magnificent.” There it was. Back again.
A few days later, I felt it again while taking a walk. And now we’re swimming in it.
Last weekend we headed to Winthrop, WA, to spend a few nights at Sun Mountain Lodge. I don’t think we could have picked a better weekend to travel the North Cascade Highway. To add a little spice, I rented a BMW M6. For that, it was also the perfect stretch of road.
I expected the landscape to be more charred from the wildfires this summer. While it was evident in some places, they were isolated pockets. It was actually at the lodge itself that fire was most evident. Shrubby, only a couple hundred yards away from where we stayed, was completely torched; the nature trail we had walked many times before seemed to have acted as a fire break.
To make sure Amelia had a quiet place to retreat to at bed time, we stayed in the cabin rather than the lodge building. Amelia had the queen bed in the bedroom to herself, while Yuling and I slept on a fold-out in the living room.
On our first morning there we drove into Twisp for breakfast, catching the last weekend for the local Farmers Market. Then we filled the afternoon with walking about. I brought a small Lego Duplo set for Amelia that she had not seen before, which kept her entertained during any down time. The cabins had no cell phone service, which caught us a bit off guard. It felt very foreign to fill the evenings with books, and Yuling and I longed for some adult company.
One of my most memorable moments was pulling out of the parking lot. While waiting for traffic to clear ahead of me, a man driving past in a Alfa Romeo slowed down, looked the BMW M6 I was driving up and down, and gave me what is best described as “the nod.”
We returned westward just in time to catch the tail end of the bomb cyclone. Driving from Everett to Seattle that afternoon was by far the lowest visibility I had ever experienced on our main Interstate. We never lost power, but many streets within a block did. Branches and debris were everywhere.
I was wise to delay putting up the Halloween decorations. But Halloween is a story for tomorrow.
All the best,
Aleks