Into the Woods...

I'm taking a few days this week to get out of the city, heading up to my favorite haunt in the Olympic Mountains.

If weather reports are accurate, I'll be getting to take a few days of sun, canoeing on a fabulously scenic lake by morning and kicking back in an Adirondak chair on the lawn, sipping kahlua and cream at sundown.

Every time I go up to this place, which I do often, I miss XGF a little bit. On our first real "vacation," -- not a weekend away to the coast -- we found some quaint lake-side cabins where time appears to have stopped back in the 1930s. It's not "retro," it's really just that way. The bathrooms have been modernized, but the rest of the cabins have just been maintained well since being built in the 1920s.

I'm not going to publish the name of the place because I don't want word getting out about it. It's already hard enough to get a reservation there in the summer and quite tricky the rest of the year, too. I had a honest-to-goodness nightmare last night that Martha Stewart was up there (staying in my cabin with me) and was so charmed by the place that she wanted to feature it on her show. I got pissed and told her she'd better not.

It's honestly not *all that* in a way that would impress Martha, but I love the place and look forward to my visit each time.

What do I tell my friends about it? That it's the most restorative place I know. The cabins are nestled, at a respectable distance from one another, in the forest of cedars, firs and hemlocks. A few of them are built a the line where the forest ends in a rocky promontory overlooking the lake, which is accessible by nearby stairs.

In the early morning, otters swim in the lake just below the cabins, looking for breakfast in the shallower water there. All day long, you can watch birds in the surrounding forest, including bald eagles. At night, when it's clear, you are treated to magnificent and open panoramas of the dark heavens, hundreds of miles away from any big cities.

I'll be going there for the first time ever with a child. This makes me a little anxious, because kids have a way of spoiling the peace and quiet just when a the weight of one's eyelids is calling for an afternoon nap. So I'll keep my fingers crossed that the 8-year-old who is joining us is subject to rational dialogue.

But just in case, I'm bringing Hershey's Kisses with peanut butter filling to BRIBE THE CHILD, if necessary. And I'm brining a few bottles of wine (and last-ditch pharmaceuticals) for me and/or her mother, Rather Shy Classmate, if my bribery goes awry and I end up creating a sugar-crazed monster.

So that's my story. I'm off for a few days. With any luck, I'll return feeling renewed and ready for whatever comes next.