Visit my new site, Rocks and Roads.

Do you have a favorite board game? I grew up playing games like Monopoly, Risk and Life. They were synonymous with family and friends. I recently stumbled upon a new board game that I think is the best out of all of them, Settlers of Catan.

My wife let me open one of my gifts early this year. When I opened the box I was surprised and excited to see Settlers (our nickname for the game) on my lap. Thankfully it was an early gift, so I had time to play it with her family before Christmas. We set it up on the table and I went to work setting up the board and explaining how the game works.

The object of the game is to be the first one to ten victory points. By collecting and trading resource cards, building settlements and cities, and wielding the robber at opportune times, each player tries to out strategize the other players in the quest for ten points. It is a strategy game that makes you think not only about your next move, but also how the other player’s moves will affect your own strategy.

The game may seem complicated at first, but once you start playing it all makes sense. You’ll never get bored because every player has the opportunity to play no matter who rolls the dice. Every play there are resource cards to pick up, trades to be made, and things to build. The fast paced action makes the game go quickly, and someone often wins within an hour, unlike some strategy board games that can go on forever.

There is even an online version that offers free and paid memberships.

Over the holidays I have probably played almost 15 games of Settlers of Catan with family and friends. The fun and competitive nature of the game has provided hours of entertainment. If you are looking for a great new board game to spice up your family game night, I would highly recommend Settlers of Catan.

What game do you love to play with your family and friends?

I’m not a huge fan of moving. I moved a ton college; every year I packed an entire dorm room’s worth of stuff into my car and drove it three hours to my parents house, where I would unload it. During my summers in college I went to summer school in Ohio and had an internship in Colorado. Each time required packing my car for both the trip there and the trip home. Needless to say, I wasn’t very excited about the process of moving (not the move itself) when we headed out to Seattle.

When we pulled into Seattle we dumped all of our stuff from our 16 foot truck into a storage unit on the 3rd floor of a Public Storage. For the next three weeks we lived out of suitcases and a couple boxes of food and clothes at a friend’s house while we searched for a place to live. Steph scoured Craigslist, looking for a place that was in good condition, but still within our budget.

One of the people we met while on vacation a few months back, Tamara, asked if we would be interested in community housing. Steph and I had talked about community housing before with our friends Nick and Hillary and Seth and Carrie, but we never thought we would be able to do it. Still, we knew that if we pooled our resources with Tamara and her son Sam, we would be able to get a nicer place while still staying within our limited budget.

We spent our afternoons driving around to different houses in northern Seattle (the area we both wanted to live in), trying to find a place to call home. We visited house after house but none of them seemed to fit. Then Steph noticed an ad on Craigslist for an nondescript 50’s style home that was close to where we were staying. We added it to our list of places to view and headed out again. None of the houses seemed right; either they were too small, or the utility bills were outrageous. Did you know that some houses still use oil for heating?!

The last house on our list was the 50’s style home we had seen on Craigslist. The ad hadn’t had much of a description and only one small picture of the outside. We turned onto 95th St (in my opinion one of the steepest streets in Seattle) and pulled into the driveway. The yard wasn’t in great shape and the house did look like it was from the 50’s, but when we turned around we discovered it had a panoramic view of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains from its living room window. Hmmm, this could work.

Still excited about the view, we toured the house and discovered there was plenty of room for all of us, and it was within our limited budget. It also had a garage and a work bench. We had found our home!

A few weeks later we signed the rental agreement and once again loaded our personal belongings and moved them out of the storage unit and into our new house. But this time I was excited.

We had a found our first home in Seattle. We had almost no traffic on our street. We were close to the city, but still far enough away to not feel crowded. And the view ain’t bad either.

More pics of our house

I’ve been looking for a chance to explore the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle since moving from Colorado. My friend Matt Angove, a doctor in the Seattle area, invited me on a hiking trip with him and his family so I jumped on the opportunity. According to Wikipedia,

the Cascades are a major mountain range of western North America, extending from southern British Columbia through Washington and Oregon to Northern California and include both non-volcanic and volcanic mountains.

We parked at the trailhead outside of Cle Elum, WA, at 7AM and headed toward the summit of Mt. Stuart, the second highest non-volcanic peak in the state of Washington. The hike description called for a 13 hour hike with over 8000 ft of elevation gain, so we decided to get an early start.

The terrain reminded me quite a bit of Colorado. Pine wood forests covered the mountainsides of peaks that rose like giants into the sky. Though not as tall as the Rockies, the Cascades seem just as big because the elevation differences between the valleys and peaks are similar to the Rockies.

From the trailhead we climbed up to Long Pass at 6800 ft, and looked across the valley at Mt. Stuart, its 9400 ft peak shrouded in a thick covering of clouds. We hiked down into the valley, hoping that the clouds would clear off by the time we climbed to the mountain summit.

We reached the valley floor between Long Pass and Mt. Stuart, and turned onto a rough trail marked with a cairn that headed up the mountain. Since there isn’t a maintained trail that leads to the summit, we began route finding up the side of the mountain when our “trail” soon disappeared. We crossed giant boulder fields and steep, rocky ravines as we slowly ascended higher and higher.

The clouds still lingered, and every time we though we had reached the summit, another peak appeared above us as more clouds dissipated. Soon we encountered vast snow fields, and our boots left fresh footprints on snow covered rocks as we continued to climb. All of a sudden we were stopped by a cliff and a sheer drop of thousands of feet into the valley below the rock we sat on. After the initial vertigo wore off, we continued our climb along the ridge line trying to locate the mountain’s summit hidden in the clouds.

At that point the clouds started to thicken and misty snow began to fall, so we decided to leave the summit bid for another day and head back down the mountain.

Perhaps I will return one day and try again. If you’re in town, I hope you can join me.

Mars Hill Graduate School started their fall semester this week. Stephanie and I attended the orientation on Monday, eager to hear what we would each be experiencing over the next three years, her from a student’s perspective, myself from a spouse’s point of view.

We walked through the doors into the red brick building located at 2501 Elliott Ave, Seattle WA. They had set up a stage in the middle of the student lounge with chairs circled around it. We ate some of the breakfast they provided, poured a cup of coffee, and found a seat among other first year students. They even had a couple of students playing jazz music in the center of the room.

The first couple hours were dedicated to meeting people, so we started conversations with some of the people sitting around us. Like us, many of them had moved across the country to Seattle in order to attend MHGS. We listened to their stories about what led them to the school and the things they had overcome to get there. Most had heard about the school through word of mouth from a friend or professor, and many had been in Seattle only a week or two, much like us.

During the orientation the faculty focused on one main goal for the first year students, exploring your own story. Find out who you are and where you are from.

After hearing this, I’m very excited to begin this journey with Stephanie. Writing a great story with my life is a theme that has been playing in my head over the past few months. Over this next year, I know that we will grow together as we each figure out our stories, both past and future.

While walking through Carkeek Park the other day, my wife and I stumbled upon a patch of wild blackberry bushes. I’d never seen wild blackberry bushes before and a local Seattleite told us to try one. I plucked one off the bush and bit into it. The juice had a sweet, tart flavor that reminded me of blackberry pie (of course). After devouring a handful, our fingers covered in berry juice, we decided to return later and gather enough berries to make our own pie.

The next evening we walked back to the park, containers in hand, and spent a couple hours picking the juiciest berries we could find. During the picking process I learned a few things about wild berry picking.

1. Wear protective clothing
The leaves on the bushes were covered in small spines that would stick to any exposed skin they touched. The spines were too small to see, but as soon as they touched your skin it burned like fire. Hours after picking I could still feel the tingles on my exposed skin where I had brushed against the leaves. From then on I wore a long sleeve shirt, pants, and bicycle gloves.

2. Bring a big stick
The bushes hung heavy with berries, but many of the biggest ones hung just out of reach behind three feet of thick, thorny brush. When I tried to reach out to get them, the spiny leaves either pricked my skin or my clothes got caught on the thorny branches. However, beating the bushes with a big stick (e.g. a wooden broomstick) quickly opened a path to the juicy berries in the back. After beating the bushes a few times, I started having more fun wielding my stick than picking the berries.

3. Pick as many as you want
The bushes had three varieties of berries. It had the big, black juicy ripe ones. Then it had red, hard berries that wouldn’t ripen for a couple days. Finally, it had green berries, which still had awhile before they would be ready to pick. We filled our containers with ripe berries, and didn’t even come close to picking them all. The next day we went back to pick more, and many of the berries that had been red the day before had fully ripened. No matter how many we picked there were plenty to go around!

We took all our berries back to the house and Steph followed a recipe we found online and baked a homemade blackberry pie. Not only did she make the crust from scratch, but also she used the wild blackberries that we had picked earlier.

Trust me, it tasted as good as it looks.

Have you every made something using wild ingredients? If so, what did you make?

Related Articles

• At Large in Ballard: Blackberry season (ballardnewstribune.com)

I love a good cup of coffee. Anytime I visit a coffee shop I ask for a hot cup of roasted coffee. No sugar, no cream, no flavorings, because I want pure, unadulterated coffee. Buying flavor free coffee allows me to appreciate the delicacies of the bean and taste the true flavors of the brew.

This week I experienced a new way to enjoy coffee in its purest form through an organized event called coffee cuppings. I’d never heard of such a thing until a friend in Seattle told me about them and insisted that I join him the next time he went. I’m always excited to try new things, and coffee cupping sounded fun.

We met at Victrola Coffee Roasters, a coffee shop located at 310 E Pike Street in the Capital Hill district of Seattle. I arrived early Wednesday morning and ordered a cup of coffee just to get a taste of what was to come. I can honestly say I’ve never had a better cup of coffee. The thought of tasting even more of their delicious coffees enhanced my anticipation of the event.

When the coffee cupping began some of the baristas led us into a small room in the back. It had a large, round wooden table in the center and brightly colored pictures of coffee farms from all over the world hung on the walls. On the table were blue trays filled of coffee beans, each tray representing a different global growing region. In front of each blue tray sat three small glasses, each one filled with a few beans from the tray in front of it. Once everyone settled into the room the barista began the coffee cupping.

He described in detail each of the five bean varieties spread around the table, explaining their differences and similarities. After the explanation, the baristas ground the beans in each cup and we walked around the table, smelling the different grounds and noticing their characteristics. The baristas then poured 200 degree water into each glass and once again the group walked around the table and smelled the coffee, noticing the different aromas produced by the wet grounds.

After the coffee steeped for four minutes, the baristas taught us how to break the crust, a process that involved swirling a metal spoon around the surface of the coffee. By lowering our noses close the glass while swirling, the intense aromas of the coffee escaped straight into our nostrils. Never had I smelled such flavor from a cup of coffee. I couldn’t wait to see if it tasted as good as it smelled.

Now that the crust was broken on each cup, we took our metal spoons and ladled out a small amount of coffee from a glass and slurped it into our mouths. As the freshly brewed coffee hit my tongue a rush of flavor flooded my taste buds. I felt like I could almost taste the country where each bean had been grown. The Latin American coffees from Guatemala and El Salvador exhibited bright, smooth flavors, while coffees from countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya had darker, spicier tones. The group slowly made our way around the table, slurping coffee and trying to determine our favorite roast.

Since attending the coffee cupping I have developed an even greater understanding of the thought process that goes into buying, roasting, and selling great coffee. Sure, you can go to the gas station and buy a cheap cup of joe if you just need some caffeine. But to take your appreciation of coffee to the next level, I would highly recommend attending a coffee cupping yourself. Ask around at local coffee shops to see if they host cuppings, and if not, have some friends over and host one yourself.

Drop me a line and I’ll try to help you set one up.

Related Articles

• How To Make Barista-Worthy Coffee At Home (mint.com)

Have you ever had a vehicle that felt like a part of you? I have.

I started driving my 1999 Mercury Sable when I moved to Tulsa OK for college. My old truck just wouldn’t cut it for traveling and the gas mileage was atrocious. So my dad handed me the keys to his car and for the next seven years I drove the Sable everywhere, from Cincinnati, OH, to Missoula, MT.

It has been the only car for my wife and I for about the last 6 months, serving as her main mode of transportation around town while I commuted by bike. We weren’t really shopping for a second car, just keeping our eyes open in case we spotted a deal. But then my mom found us a great deal on a Rav4 and we added it to our stable.

We had both vehicles for about a month before we decided to move to Seattle. Part of the decision process for moving included downsizing to one car. Parking is horrible in the city, and the vast amount of public transportation and bike lanes makes having two vehicles a little overkill for a small family starting city life.

Due to the logistics of having two cars in the city, we decided to sell the Sable. This decision did not come easy for me. The Sable and I have been through so much together. While some might label it a “grandpa car,” I thought it was appropriately stylish and performed its job well, namely transporting me from A to B as safely and smoothly as possible.

The smooth ride resembled the feeling of skiing down a mountain on fresh powder. The car soaked up every bump in the road, and once you hit cruising speed on the interstate you felt like you were floating above the asphalt. The nondescript styling might not have turned any heads, but I wasn’t trying to win any awards for looks. And the paint job single handedly decreased my workload by 50%. The champagne color hid dirt perfectly, allowing me to go months without washing the car. Honestly, even after I washed it, I couldn’t tell a huge difference in its appearance.

We spent the entire month before we left for Seattle trying to sell it. We had a few inquiries, but nothing concrete until a week before we left. We were in Estes Park at the time so I negotiated over the phone and settled on a fair price. Well, fair in the sense that we could sell the car before moving, and the new owner would be getting a smoking deal. The day before leaving Grand Junction we met, signed the papers, and I handed over the keys for the last time.

I didn’t shed a tear or experience regret, but it still stirred up some emotion. As I sit and think about all the good times I had in that car, all the miles we traveled together, all the places we saw, I can’t help but smile. Travel on, Sable.

If you didn’t know, my wife and I have recently moved across the country to Seattle. We arrived a couple days ago and have been busy adjusting to life in the big city. We are staying with friends until we find a place of our own, and I am working on getting my business, Endo Creative, off the ground. But before arriving in Seattle, we faced a thousand mile trek hauling our stuff to our new home.

We had made the drive a little over a month ago in our Rav4 when we visited Seattle on vacation. But this time I drove a 16 foot Budget moving truck while towing our Toyota Rav4 on a large metal car trailer. I have never driven anything quite like it. Thankfully most of our trip took place on the interstate, but there were still a few noticeable differences between the truck and the cars I’m used to driving.

We pulled out of Grand Junction early Sunday morning. Right away I knew I wasn’t driving a normal passenger vehicle. The truck, completely full of all of our earthly belongings, strained against the load as I stepped on the gas. Slowly the truck picked up speed as I drove down residential streets toward the interstate.

I made the left turn onto the on ramp, and gave the truck as much gas as possible. It rumbled up the ramp, slowly building up speed until I reached 55 mph. The car trailer warned to not exceed this particular speed while towing a vehicle, and I would rather be safe than sorry. Besides, I wasn’t sure how a truck of this size would react on the road. After a couple a miles I realized it wasn’t much different than driving a car, it just reacted slower. Slower to speed up, slower to stop.

I reached the bottom of the first set of hills outside of Rabbit Valley and that’s when I realized just how much of a load I was hauling. The truck immediately began slowing down as the grade steepened and cars sped by me as I struggled to keep the truck moving up the side of the hill. Slowly we climbed our way to the summit of the hill at a measly 30 mph, our hazard lights flashing to warn trailing motorists of our slow speed. I also noticed the temperature gauge rising the more I pushed on the gas, detouring me from revving the engine more to increase our speed.

We finally reached the summit of the first hill and coasted down the other side. At the bottom of the next hill we started the process all over again, a process we would repeat numerous times over the next thousand miles.

The truck was stock. It had no power windows, no power locks, and no CD player. The only thing it included for entertainment purposes was a radio. However, I wasn’t very optimistic about our chances of finding a radio station in some of the more remote locations we would be traveling through. And Stephanie was bummed to not be able to listen to our huge CD collection we had prepared for the trip. As a last resort, we could always sing songs to each other.

So together we drove west, thinking about the adventures ahead and the life we were leaving behind. Oh, and we found a decent station on the radio, too.

[Image by phil_g, docsearls]

The day started off bright and early. My team, Iron Will, loaded our gear into the truck and headed up Highway 91 to the starting line in the small town of Leadville, located at “The Top of the Word” at 10,040 ft. After a quick breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, I saddled my bike with the rest of my team started the first leg of the three day tour. My legs quickly settled into a circular rhythm, as my lungs struggled to adjust to the altitude. Before I knew it we reached Tennessee Pass, the first pass of many I would climb over the next three days. I reloaded my water bottles with Gatorade and sped down from the pass at 40 mph.

The steep decent soon ended, and once again I climbed, this time towards the summit of Battle Mountain. Much steeper than the first, I started to feel the burn in my legs. I knew I had to save my energy though, because the true test of the day still loomed after lunch, the infamous Vail Pass. I reached the top of the climb and quickly descended through the small mountain town of Minturn and arrived at West Vail for lunch.

I fueled up on turkey and pretzels, both anticipating and dreading the grueling climb ahead. Vail sits around 8,000 ft, while the pass stands at 10,666 ft. An omen, perhaps? After the break, I rolled out of the lunch area and spun my pedals to force the blood through my legs again. In the distance I noticed Interstate 70 winding toward the pass at a seemingly vertical grade. Cars with engines have a hard enough time gaining the summit, let alone a biker attempting it with nothing more than two wheels and a pair of legs.

I ignored the aid station at the bottom of the pass, deciding not to lose my focus or momentum on an unnecessary pit stop. Immediately after the aid station, the bike path steepened drastically. I set my jaw, shifted to my lowest gear, and vowed to not stop pedaling, enviously watching the cars speed by on the nearby interstate.

Mile after mile slowly ticked by, when all of a sudden the bike path swerved under the interstate. On the other side stood one of the hardest hills I’ve ever climbed. Already in my lowest gear, legs screaming from the climb, I stood in my saddle and pedaled with everything I had just to keep from falling over. I inched my way up the extreme incline at a snail’s pace, passing bikers who had either resorted to walking their bikes up the hill, or were lying next to the trail, to exhausted to continue. I so badly wanted to unclip from my pedals and lie down with them, but I knew I couldn’t stop.

More determined than ever I gave one final push and crested the top of the incline. The next few miles, still quite steep, put me in a zone. In my mind I kept repeating to myself “just keep pedaling.” Finally, after 10 grueling miles, I heard the ringing bells of the volunteers welcoming riders to the summit of Vail Pass. I had conquered the beast without so much as putting a foot down on the pavement. With a feeling of victory and accomplishment I refilled my water bottles, ate a couple cookies, and coasted down into Copper Mountain Resort and the finish line.

Stay tuned for recaps of day 2 and day 3 of the Courage Classic…