Walking around our hazy forest & a big bunny yawn

This past Sunday, we drove out to our property in the forest to walk around and see how it looks in the hazy, smoky wildfire weather that we've been experiencing this past week here just outside of Seattle, Washington. 

NASA IMages of the wildfires and smoke

The smoke was so thick that the sun could only break through occasionally, but when it did the quality of the light became almost cinematic and orange-tinged. I didn't bring my camera out but I had my cell phone, so I took a few photos anyway. 

Our house building site

We're just about ready to submit our building permits and hopefully start building our house within the next year, but we're in no big rush and we're making sure to spend a lot of time on the house design before finalizing everything. 

The land we purchased is seven acres in an old logging forest with some evidence of old growth tree stumps. One particular stump and downed tree that we have is 600 years old! The majority of the trees currently standing are new growth evergreen trees, around 50-60 years old.

The climate in the Pacific Northwest makes our forest a temperate rainforest, full of lush ferns, evergreen trees, and moss blanketing everything.

sword ferns and mossy logs

scraggly moss-covered maple near the wetland

View on the Noth side, looking towards thousands of acres of logging forest owned by of Department of Natural Resources 

orange smoke-diffused light on the trees

It can be a little difficult to traverse the land sometimes with the occasionally unstable, perpetually decaying forest floor.

The meadow full of sword ferns and alder trees in front of our house building site

It's not quite mushroom season here yet- we usually see the most mushrooms/fungi here in October once the rains begin, but we did find a few on this particular walk. I'm not sure exactly what this one is, but it looks like a kind of shelf fungi. 

Black Bear, wildlife camera

We have a wildlife camera tied around a tree facing a path that we, as well as many of the forest animals, frequently walk. We've seen black bears and deer so far, but we also have cougars, which we have yet to see, fortunately. 

Deer, wildlife camera

When we got home in the evening, our bunny Violet, who is not used to spending much time alone, was very happy to see us and made sure she was the center of attention and cuddled with for the rest of the night. 

Anthony found himself with our video camera in a slow-motion setting at just the right moment to capture this very relaxed stretch and slightly terrifying yawn. 

We're staying inside now that the smoke has become much more thick over the past few days and trying to minimize the negative health implications of breathing in all of those particles, but it was interesting to see how it changed the light in the forest and spend a little time out in nature.

I hope everyone else has had a relaxing weekend and that you're safe and far away from all of the wildfires and heavy smoke. 

I'll be back with more recipes (and recipe videos) very soon!

Why We're Moving Out & Selling Our Airstream Travel Trailer

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If you had told us one week ago that we'd be selling our Airstream travel trailer and moving back into an apartment, we wouldn't have believed it. Up until last week we couldn't see any reason to ever want to sell our trailer and move. We expected that we would live in it at least for the next year while building our house and then possibly keep it around for years to come. Then, a windstorm came and changed everything for us. 

At around 7 pm last Thursday, Anthony had just gotten home from work and was feeling very anxious about the weather. The winds were gusting upwards of 50 mph, and as we live on a hilltop in the convergent zone, the gusts can get especially intense. As the gusts grew stronger and stronger, Anthony became more concerned and couldn't do anything other than look out the windows and watch as the tall evergreen trees next to us were bending sideways.

I was trying to stay calm. We had been through worse windstorms in the trailer before and had only seen a few small branches go flying by so I figured this would be the case with this storm as well. I even started to get upset with Anthony for his fixation on the wind and inability to relax. My intuition that night was completely wrong. 

Anthony was looking out the window during a particularly huge sustained gust and watched as the giant evergreen trees next to us bent completely sideways. He yelled over to me that one was about to go down and suddenly we heard a loud crack. I screamed and covered my head, attempting to brace for the potential impact of a 200 ft. fir tree smashing through our aluminum trailer. Time slowed down and the sound of the crack felt long and slow and then we heard the booming sound of the tree hitting the ground next to our trailer.

We looked outside to find that this giant tree had been completely uprooted and landed 20 ft away from us. It had taken out a couple of smaller trees on it's way down as well. We didn't want to stick around and wait for another one to fall, so we grabbed our bunny, Violet, and all got in the car to go wait out the storm in the parking lot across the street where we could watch the trees bend over our trailer from a distance.

This is the point when we began to discuss the idea of selling the trailer and moving into an apartment. 

Aside from our current spot, RV parks which are a reasonable distance to Anthony's work basically don't exist, so we didn't really have the option to move the trailer somewhere else. We considered staying where we are, but we were still surrounded by several more tall evergreen trees and knew we didn't want to be near them in the next wind storm.

The tall trees next to our trailer were all old evergreen trees that used to be in the middle of a dense natural forest, but recently after 7 acres of forest were cleared on the lot next to us (as shown in our last video) these old trees were now being exposed to high winds that they were never meant to endure. It became clear to us after talking with the RV park staff as well as the contractor on the 7 acre lot next to us, that no one was going to be watching out for us and checking on these trees. We had to make the difficult decision to take our safety into our own hands, so we decided to sell the trailer and move.

This past weekend was incredibly sad for us because we loved our life in the Airstream and it didn't feel right to end our adventure of living in it so soon, but we knew it was the right decision for us and that we needed to take our safety concerns seriously after such a close brush with what could've been a disaster. 

Our bunny Violet, adapting to our new place

We found an apartment walking distance to Anthony's work and spent this past week moving in and adjusting to apartment life again. While this doesn't change our long-term plans, and we still plan on being in our house that we're building a year from now, no longer living in an Airstream and moving back into a city is a big adjustment for us.

There are certainly many things we have now in our apartment that we didn't have in the trailer and it definitely feels luxurious to have all of the standard amenities again, but there's still a lot we're going to miss about our life in the trailer. 

I'll be writing a post soon about all of the pros and cons of living in an Airstream travel trailer full time for more of a detailed look at what we loved and what we didn't so much love about RV life, but until then I just wanted to post this update for anyone who was curious to know why we made such a sudden change.

We'll be continuing to make videos and share our experiences with our next adventure of building our house which hopfully will be starting in the fall.