That is my glass of cream soda. Yes, soda! We bought the book Homemade Root Beer, Soda, and Pop so we could have something on tap for the kiddos. And us. Soda is yummy!

We have two taps for beer - right now we are serving a Widmer W’10 clone and an apricot wheat. Life is better with choices!

We got a chalkboard at a garage sale for a buck, so of course we had to name our brewery. We chose Victory Point Brewing because of our board game obsession interest. The tag line is commonly found in our board game directions: “The winner is the player with the most victory points”.

Looky! We even bought shelves to house our games. Now we can use the table, play the conga, and navigate the floors.

Sadly, this isn’t all of them, but the bookshelves are happy to have some breathing room back again.

Looking into the fault.

We got O to his appointment and after a chest x-ray it was confirmed that he had primary pneumonia, meaning he picked up the actual pneumonia bug, it didn’t start out as a something else and move into pneumonia. She gave him some antibiotics and by that afternoon his fever broke for good and he was feeling much better. Hurray! Except we were leaving the next day to head home. D’oh!

The sun looks so beautiful going down behind the mountains.

We bid farewell to the family and drove my mom up to her place. The next day we headed for Portland, with a stop along the way in Ashland at Funagain Games to pick up our order (Igloo Pop, Gonzaga, and Opera, for those playing along at home). As usual, the kids were great in the car. We always end up driving back into Portland at 5pm, so that feeling of almost being home is put off an extra hour by traffic. Boo.

Anyway, it was a nice trip in spite of the glitches. I was really happy to have had a chance to go back to Mammoth, and to show the place to the kids.

My mom, brother, SIL, niece, nephew, XM and I took the shuttle down into Reds Meadows and Devil’s Postpile National Monument.

Rock formation at Devil's Postpile.

It was much warmer down in the valley than up at Mammoth.

Granny and XM.

We went over to Soda Springs, an area by the San Joaquin river where mineral springs bubble up. Unfortunately the water level was so high the springs were way underwater - we saw the bubbles, but it was too diluted to taste different.

The San Joaquin at Soda Springs.

We did wander around the meadow a bit, where we found a snake swimming across one of the waterways.

Sir Hiss.

The cousins and XM filled out some fun Junior Ranger booklets specific to Devil’s Postpile, and were sworn in as official Junior Rangers. We brought O’s nearly completed book with us and XM explained his situation so they gave him a badge as well, as long as he promised to take the oath. Luckily we got the whole thing on tape. It was all pretty cute.

Newly minted Junior Ranger.

Later we took the gondola up to the top of Mammoth mountain. It was a gorgeous day and the views were just amazing.

On the way up.

View from the top.

Hey! I can see our condo!

O wasn’t any better, but it was good for his body to be able to relax. Later that evening we watched a deer wander through the brush behind the condo.

The plan for Monday was to head out as a group to Yosemite. We decided to wait until the morning to see how O was feeling before committing to the plan, so we dosed him up with more meds and crossed our fingers.

Tune in for the final installation: Mammoth Vacation! The Final Days.

The next morning my brother took the kids out into the meadow behind the condo. They were just going to run around out there, but pretty soon they were marching off into the forest on a trail. D and I grabbed the camera and hurried to catch up. We found them playing Pooh sticks.

We found this tree by the condo - apparently the gardener watches too much Mythbusters.

That afternoon the friends and family all gathered again and we had a little memorial for dad. Can you believe that at 75 he still had many of the friends he made when he was nine? It was a funny and touching gathering as we all reminisced about Frank Blackford.

Afterwards we hosted a BBQ for everyone at a beautiful spot called Hayden Cabin - an old timey cabin/museum in a little meadow next to Mammoth Creek. I somehow managed not to get any pictures of the creek, which was so full that parts had to be sandbagged so it wouldn’t overflow into the cabin area!

We had the party catered by Angel’s Restaurant, a local place that caters events with a big smoker. I figured as the lone vegans we’d be bringing our own dinner, but it turns out in this not terribly vegan-friendly town that the BBQ restaurant has vegan baked beans, cooks the corn without butter, and makes the most delicious vegetable skewers I have ever had. The owners also said they have vegan food on their restaurant menu, and that they cook the food separate from the meat. Wow! It is really rare to have people “get it”, and I couldn’t thank them enough for being so awesome.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather, the temperature was just perfect.

We had some fun taking pictures on a huge boulder as the sun sank behind the mountains.

O was a trooper throughout, despite the fluctuating fever, hacking cough, and lack of appetite and energy. We decided that he would have to miss any planned events for the next day and just stay home and rest.

That is where our journey will continue - with Mammoth Vacation! Quick! Go Sight-seeing Before the Rest of Us Get Sick Too!

We headed out for some sightseeing, and went up to the lakes. Our first stop was at Twin Lakes and a visit to the campground I always stayed at when we came up in the summer. Here is a shot of Twin Falls - the water level was really high this year and everything was beautiful. We even saw a bald eagle.

We drove up past the rest of the lakes and stopped at Horseshoe Lake, where the mountain is releasing enough carbon dioxide to kill the trees. Spooky!

The lake was just gorgeous. There was a huge patch of snow down to the lake shore just to the right of the photo.

The kids were impressed by this big cracked rock.

The road to the upper lakes leads to a great view from the top of Twin Falls. Here is Twin Lakes, and the valley behind it.

Our next stop was for some beer at Mammoth Brewing Company. They had free tasters of all ten of their beers, plus root beer for the kids. The beer is really good, and D and I were smitten with the IPA 395, a double IPA that uses hops with local sage and juniper.

That night we had a party in our condo for the friends and family that had come from all points across the country to celebrate my dad. My brother had a ton of pictures of my dad enlarged and mounted on foam core, so he was watching the proceedings from several vantage points. He also converted a bunch of old family super 8 movies to DVD and had that playing as everyone ate, drank, and chatted the night away. It was a really nice time, and a testament to how much my dad was loved by everyone.

We finally managed to get the kids to bed and dosed the boy up with codeine cough medicine. He slept pretty well for the first time in a few nights, but it would turn out to only be a brief reprieve…

I think I’ll split the Friends and Family Plan into two parts, as I have a dozen more pictures and I don’t want to make this one too long! So I’ll see you again, at Mammoth Vacation! The Friends and Family Plan Part Two.

We left on a beautiful, partly cloudy Wednesday and headed south for the long drive down I-5.The kids were great, as always, on the long car ride. Here is O rocking his new headphones.

We stopped in Medford for lunch. This was our second vacation as vegans, so we did some research and ate lunch at what turned out to be a mediocre Indian food place. Not bad food, just nothing we’d go back for. The waitress noticed O was coughing a lot, and asked him if he had allergies. The cough was sort of out of nowhere, and I thought maybe it was just the dry A/C air in the car. Turns out this was the beginning of what would be an interesting development!

Does anyone else make their kids stop for a photo op at a rest area? This one is so pretty, down by the Klamath River just north of Yreka.

We spent the night at my mom’s house outside of Chico. O was looking a little off so we took his temperature with her old-fashioned glass and mercury thermometer (!!!) and it was in the low 100 range. His cough was pretty deep and rattly so we got him some cough meds to help him sleep. We packed my mom’s stuff into the car in the morning and I squished in the back between the kids for the ride to Mammoth. We packed a lunch and stopped at this little roadside set of picnic tables in Nevada. At this point O started to look pretty bad and feel pretty miserable, and the trusty thermometer said 102. Good thing D bought kid’s fever reducer when he bought the cough medicine.

As we got closer to Mammoth we realized we’d be there too early to check in, so we stopped at the Mono Lake Visitor Center for a bit.

There were swallows nesting under the eaves of the building.

The clouds were amazing over Mono Craters.

We headed on into Mammoth. It looked exactly as I remember it, and I hadn’t been since the summer after I graduated high school. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I am absolutely smitten with this part of the world. D prefers his forests a little more subtropical, but I love the sharp peaks outlined against the sky and the fragrance of sagebrush and pine trees. We headed up to the condos, where we had just recently been upgraded to the top spot because someone decided to paint the condo we had initially reserved. That put my family, my mom, and my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids in a 3500 square foot, 5 bedroom condo with foosball and a pool table. It was amazing.

The kids enjoyed looking for fish and frogs in this pond while my mom got the keys to the condo. I was adjusting my camera when I heard a splash - XM had fallen in. I guess saying “please be careful!” forty times isn’t enough. Luckily it was only about eight inches deep. Unluckily, I didn’t catch it on film.

The condo was pretty amazing, and we spent the rest of the day catching up with the rest of the family and a few friends that stopped by.

The best part about the condo was the view…we were so fortunate to have a deck facing the mountains instead of the golf course, the road, or other condos.

It was fortunate we got such a large condo, as O’s cough kept him (and us) up most of the night.

Stay tuned for part two: Mammoth Vacation! The Friends and Family Plan.

Since D is spending part of the 4th of July tending to his delicious homebrew (smoked porter is on tap, and the apricot wheat is on deck), I decided to attempt some culinary creations with the profusion of lavender in the front yard.

I checked out the cookbook The Vegan Table from the library and made the lavender lemonade and the lavender tea cookies. Both have a subtle, fragrant lavender taste to them. Pretty yummy!

I also infused some (cheap) vodka with fresh lavender. My obvious error here was using the crappy vodka, but I didn’t want to ruin good vodka if it wasn’t going to work. The lavender vodka is really nice, but the harsh vodka kinda ruins it. I’ll have to try again with our regular Monopolowa.

Sweet woodruff is cute little herb/ground cover that has been used in Germany to flavor many things. Apparently you aren’t allowed to do that any more because of the toxicity of the coumarin in it in high doses (coumarin is also found in chamomile and mullein, other herbs used for health). It sounds like a couple of springs in some wine or jelly isn’t harmful, unless you drank/ate several bottles at once!

I found a couple different ways to make the wine, so I tried the easiest. I picked and dried five springs of woodruff, then steeped it with one cup of riesling and three tablespoons of sugar for 24 hours. Then I strained it and returned it to the bottle with the rest of the wine.

I think it might be an acquired taste. It was sweet, almost like a dessert wine, and I didn’t mind the flavor at first, but the more I sipped the less I liked it. D said it tasted like he was drinking white wine outside when someone went by with a lawnmower and grass flew into his glass.

I also made May jelly from a recipe found in the book Living with Herbs (the title cracks me up, it makes it sound like a bad thing you have to suffer through (though if I keep making weird things with them, maybe it is!)). This time I steeped just 1/3 of a cup of fresh sprigs in white grape juice for a couple of hours, before straining it and cooking it up with sugar, lemon juice, and orange rinds.

The result is much tastier than the wine! Even the kids like it. It is really subtle, sweet with a vaguely herby flavor that isn’t off-putting. We’ve just had it on toast. Now I want to make more herb jellys!

Sweet woodruff is also used to make berliner weisse beer - a sour wheat beer served with flavored syrups. I’m bummed I never got to try Full Sail’s berliner weisse with green sweet woodruff syrup. Maybe D can brew one and I can make the syrup for it!

O’s school had Run for the Arts, a fundraiser that brings money for (you guessed it!) arts to the school.  XM had fun cheering him on. She’ll be able to run next year!

The O’s school had Celebrate Reading Week. They had a storyteller assembly, he got to participate in author’s tea because he wrote a book (all kids get the opportunity, and the books are in the school library), and finally the whole school had a storybook parade. O was Percy Jackson. I got to hand paint his shirt.

Anyway, here I am again, and I think about blogging here often, I swear.

Here, let me give you a homemade, vegan creme egg to make up for it. I miss blogging here, so I’ll try and do it once a week or so.

In the meantime, check out my art Shameless Self Promotion Facebook Fan Page Facebook Page of Me That You Can “Like”.