On Vacation!

Yesterday we went to the Pocono Mountains for a short-ish ski vacation. With Dog Mob, of course.

We're renting a cabin near the Blue Mountain ski area. It has a nice backyard:

(Not pictured on that one: Crookytail, because he ran off into the woods to get eaten by bears.)

It also has a pellet stove for heat, which caused us to nearly freeze to death on arrival last night, because it was 2 degrees outside and about 40 degrees inside, and we -- being idiot clueless city types -- were hilariously unable to get the stove lit.

Eventually the spousal unit managed to figure it out, though. (For the record, the ultimate problem -- other than us initially not recognizing the pellet stove, then not recognizing the hopper, and then not bringing enough pellets into the stove -- was that the stove had a safety lock on the front window panel and we hadn't closed it all the way.)

And lo, so we were spared freezing to death.

This afternoon we attempted to brave Beltzville State Park and hike with the dogs.

This didn't entirely work out as planned, because there was over a solid foot of snow and crusted ice on the ground, making it impossible to spot the actual trails. We settled on a service road as a makeshift "trail," following the helpful advice of another hiker-with-dogs in the area, but we'd barely gotten started on the route when a sudden snowstorm came in and wiped out visibility almost completely.

Here's a progression of the storm blowing in on us. I took these shots over the course of about five minutes.

The afternoon sun is actually in frame in that last shot -- the camera is facing it straight on -- but the snow is blowing in so hard that you have to look pretty hard to see it.

So we turned around and went home... and, of course, the snow all went away as soon as we gave up. Oh well. We'll brave it again later, I hope, since the fake service road "trail" looked promising from what little I could see.

And that was our first day on vacation. Crooky spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Peter, who discovered some sleds at the cabin, and Pongu worked on his homework for a bit.