We just came home from a weekend at my boss's "cabin" in Forest Lakes. You can see from the photo why they call it "The Big House". It's quite a roomy place. It has 3 stories, 3 bedrooms, plus 4 additional twin beds. We were quite comfortable there, to say the least.
We went with our friends, Andy, Julie, Rochelle & Devry and we had a great time.
Friday night we discovered that Rochelle and Devry knew how to play Nertz, so of course we had to play. We had a chance to use the beautiful cards that Terry's mom brought back for us from Ireland. You'll see them here.
Andy & Julie were amazing! I don't think they've played so well in all the time we've known them. They just couldn't lose. It was crazy, but we had a blast anyway, even though they smoked all the rest of us.
Saturday we did some hiking along the Rim Trail and even saw a deer, but couldn't get a good picture of it because it ran away too fast. This was a view from the trail. It was a perfect day with temps in the low to mid 70's.
That night we went to a local restaurant called Bugles for dinner, because we heard that they had a prime rib special on Saturday nights. Overall, the food was quite under-whelming and the service was questionable as well. The funniest part of the whole night was when Julie ordered her salmon dinner and in order to cut down on calories, she asked the waitress if she could have an extra amount of vegetables instead of the baked potato. The waitress was happy to oblige. You can't believe the look on all of our faces when she brought her salmon out with a double portion of canned corn with butter!!! Not exactly the healthy vegetables that Julie had envisioned. We laughed out loud at that one.
I'm not sure we'll go back there, at least for dinner. There were quite a few pitfalls in the meal time, but I won't go into them here. Maybe breakfast or lunch might be a little safer.
Saturday night after we got home, the gang discovered the foosball table in the basement. 
Again, Andy was insane and won every single game that he played, except one where he only lost by 1 point. Julie, Devry and Terry were all pretty intense as well, with bruises, sore muscles and all. Rochelle happened to be tied up on a phone call for some of the time, and I got a chance to play with my new lens and try out some of the pictures without a flash.
The last couple of photos are some of my wildlife shots. We actually saw quite a few beautiful blue birds. Not bluebirds, but birds that were blue (not sure what they were). Unfortunately, I couldn't get any good shots of them in flight and that's when their colors showed the best. Got some shots of squirrels too, but nothing special. This beetle was on the deck at the house. It was GINORMOUS!!! I thought the bees at the purple thistle were pretty cool. Enlarge to see the one in flight. I didn't even realize that I had gotten that shot until I got home and saw it on the computer. Pretty cool, huh?
Overall it was a really fun weekend. I hope we get a chance to go back there again. My boss and his wife (who's also my boss) are so generous to let us and many others use the place.
