MOXIE MOM on Life & Kids
Good-bye
Today is the last day of Neighborhood Kids, and I had every intention of posting several times in the last two weeks. But somehow parenting took over. Both my kids are moving up a level, one to middle school and one to high school, and the sports commitment is already wearing me out (at the high school level). School hasn’t even started yet, and suddenly I have new respect for all the overwhelmed and distracted high school parents in my life. Parenting babies and toddlers is time consuming, but I’m learning that you stay busy, really busy, the whole way along the parent journey.
Meanwhile, I am sorry I will no longer be blogging for Neighborhood Kids. Over the time I’ve been doing it, I have enjoyed passing along recommendations, reflecting on the parenting life, and passing on travel tips that I can’t help being excited about. I have no idea what my readership is, but thank you to all of you who have read my posts over the years.
Good luck and good times with your own families.
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Stehekin
Every summer, my husband has been saying for years now we need to work in a trip to Stehekin. I always associated the tiny community with hiking over Cascade Pass. A little place at the north end of Lake Chelan that is the ends of the Earth, whether approached by hiking over a pass or taking a 4-hour boat ride.
Well, it’s true, you have to hike or take a long boat ride (or the Express boat, a two and a half hour ride, or you can fly in on a float plane in 25 minutes, I learned). Whichever way you get there, and I do recommend the longer boat ride at least one way, it’s worth it. I’m in love with Stehekin.
Kind of funny to me because I grew up on Lummi Island, remote enough when you’re 12 and you can’t drive, and you’re surrounded by water, and the only entertainment is the fun you cook up yourself. I fled as soon as I could (and then rebounded back to the Northwest as so many of us do).
But maybe that’s why Stehekin felt kind of like home.
Stehekin is a not a town, per se, but a valley with one road about a dozen miles long and few spurs and a population of 85. It’s also one of the gateways to the North Cascades National Park. The only cars there are those brought in by barge. Visitors 
can bring bikes, rent bikes, walk, or take the shuttle bus up and down the valley for a small fee. The pedestrian-only access forces you to slow down. Your cell phone doesn’t have coverage so you might as well turn it off, and you won’t be able to check email. As cliche as it sounds, you do feel like you’re taking a step back in time.
Instead of checking email, you’ll visit the most excellent North Cascades Visitor Center at Stehekin Landing, where the boats come in, which feels like town central but in reality is only a small part of Stehekin. You’ll ride your bike to the Stehekin Pastry Company for breakfast, lunch, or snacks in between, just a couple miles up from the Landing. You might even run into one of your neighbors from home — we did.
You’ll stop by the old Stehekin school and marvel that it was closed as recently as 1988 (to make way for the new, larger school just down the road) because it feels so 1910-ish.You’ll hike the short trail to Rainbow Falls and be as impressed as you are with Snoqualmie Falls, if you’ve been there.
You’ll ride your bike up-valley and notice the blue quality of the Stehekin River, and you’ll be charmed by Stehekin Valley Ranch, where you can rent cabins. You might make reservations to have dinner even if you’re not staying there. We did, and it was excellent — a family-style dinner served in a dining room with a sawdust floor, broad beams, and a fireplace that holds tall coffeepots of cowboy coffee.
You might buy veggies from the organic garden near the bakery because the general store carries only soda pop, a few cans of soup, and lots of T-shirts (and hauling food for several days from Chelan is kind of a pain).
If you stay at the lodge at Stehekin Landing, you’ll notice that every day brings a flurry of daytrippers between 11am and 2pm, when the boats arrive and then take off. The visitors hit the Landing, rent bikes, ride around, and then are gone as quickly as they arrived. It’s the main action of the day and kind of fun. And then Stehekin is suddenly quiet, and you’ll remember you came to get away from it all.
Stehekin is a fascinating blend of national park service employees, backpackers hiking in from the other side, tourists from down-lake, and locals eking out a living in a remote location that cuts them off from just about everything and suits them just fine.
Summer is beautiful — we hit the sunny weather just right — but you can visit year-round, albeit on a more limited boat schedule. I’m guessing the fall colors are spectacular.
Note: the park offers camping, but if you’re looking for a family of four or more, I would talk to rangers in advance. We camped and found the sites to be abysmally small for a family-sized tent.
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Farewell news
Last night our family arrived home from Stehekin, a small community at the north end of Lake Chelan, and after being unplugged for a few days, I turned on my computer to learn that Neighborhood Kids will be going offline. It was sudden news to me as much as to all of you who use the website.
On the one hand, I am very sorry to see the site go. I love being able to recommend it to new families (and old families) as a resource for what’s going on in town. I also love blogging for it (although, yes, I have been a flaky blogger this summer).
On the other hand, I also know the amount of work it takes to sustain a site for nothing, and the energy drain it can be, both in time and money. A Seattle friend of mine maintains a family travel website for Pacific Northwest families, and she went through this exact angst a couple months ago. I think enough of us talked her into keeping it going that she’s giving it a second whirl, but it might not last.
So, while I am sad to see Neighborhood Kids go, I can understand why it’s going.
Sigh.
In the meantime, we have until August 31. Stay tuned. I can’t wait to tell you about Stehekin. It’s such a cool place.
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Nighttime Visitor
We have a new cat door coming today via UPS, whose arrival we're anxiously awaiting because we're leaving town for ten days on Friday, and we have an an unwelcome visitor most nights who tries to get into the house through the cat door (now that we've taken to locking it, the catfood is no longer disappearing, but the cats are still peeved they have to stay inside when we lock up).
About a month ago, we noticed when we got up in the morning that the catfood was gone, the water bowl was a mess, and the food bag was tipped over. On the second morning, we found Ty's lunchbox by the backdoor with a peanut butter sandwich expertly pulled out through a 3-inch opening and peeled apart. Hmm, awfully sophisticated for cats. And when I saw kibbles in the water bowl, my first thought was, that is the action of a raccoon.
Raccoon? Surely not. Not with a magnetized cat door.
On the third day, when Curt was out of town, I stayed up late with the cats to watch a movie. After it was over, the three of us ambled into the kitchen, where I felt a presence in the air that put me on double alert. Or, rather, I sensed a presence had just left the kitchen. Not a thief, though. Or at least not a human thief. The cats felt it too, and I looked at them, and they looked at me, and we all looked at the cat door and then back at each other. And I was thinking, well, that's just great, I'm in charge here. There's nothing quite so unnerving as feeling in charge -- with cats -- when something creepy just happened. How is it my husband manages to miss all the big moments (the two times I barfed during pregnancy, the day I found a dead possum in the garage, the weekend our cat died, and now the night we're feeling on edge and no solid, male presence)?
But we're tough. Thank goodness we don't live in Alaska, though, where the predators are so much bigger. I opened the backdoor in time to see a ringed tail waltzing off in the dark toward our fence. The cats flew out the door and huffed around the patio with their tails puffed and their backs arched, ready to take on the wildlife world. Um, yeah, kitties, hate to break to you, but you will not win this one if you engage in a fight.
Well, what to do except bring the cats in and lock the cat door, much to their chagrin. At least we determined who our visitor is.
And so because we don't like the idea of a raccoon going through our cupboards, we've been locking the cat door ever since (we figured out it is ever so easy to open the cat door outward from the outside with something like a little nail, or a raccoon fingernail, as must be the case -- unless the bugger is buying magnets on the black market.)
But we're investing in a raccoon-proof door so we don't have to remember to lock the cat door every night because whenever we forget, that rascal is in the kitchen in a flash. The other night I heard the door banging around, and I went down the stairs to stare through the [locked] cat door window at the little raccoon face on the other side. She/he stared back for 30 seconds and then took off.
Anyway, If you need to solve your own cat door problems, feel free to give me a shout. I've done the research. Don't ask me to help with dead possums, though. I learned that's my limit.
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