Thursday, August 20, 2009

Scrapbook layouts

I'm actually trying to get a whole scrapbook done from our 2008 Montana vacation. Believe it or not, I have 6 layouts completed and I plan on 3 more double page spreads. Here's what I've done so far....






All the layouts use templates from Simply Yin (she offers wonderful freebies!)

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Huckleberry time!!

Before I met Jason, I would have thought that a huckleberry was just a character from a cartoon. A couple of years ago on our Montana trip, I went with Jason on a huckleberry finding mission. We were successful in finding a patch of the elusive little berries and now we make sure that each time we go to Montana, we take a drive up the mountain to our spot with the huckleberries and spend as much time as we can picking them.

We were fortunate to be going a few weeks later in July this year. I say fortunate because the huckleberries had more time to get ripe for us. Jason and I drove up alone one of the first days we got to Montana to scout out whether or not they were ripe and hoping that they hadn't been discovered by the locals. We had our first hint that the huckleberries were close by when we found a big pile of bear poop on the road. It was purple-ish...which meant that there were definitely berries nearby!

Do you see that tiny little berry? THAT is a huckleberry. Just click on the photo to see the details full size.
Jason took a picture of me with my baggie of berries since I'm usually the one behind the camera. Now I have visual proof that I was really there! LOL...

After a week of vacation, the kids were ready to pack up and head back to Arizona. They had no more reason to stay since the cousins had already gone back home to California. We told them that we were going to go pick berries one more time and if they wanted to leave a day early, then they had to lose a little sleep and go huckleberry picking with me while Jason was golfing with his buddy, Scott.
Here they all are with their own baggies of berries. Well, there were so many more left and Jason really wanted to go back out, that he and I went back later that day and picked some more. I was amazed to find that we were also surrounded by wild strawberries. They were EVERYWHERE! Here is a handful that I picked. They were really small but were super sweet and delicious.
The strawberries went into my tummy right away. I think I should have picked some more to share, but we were not there to pick strawberries.
So now we have 3 baggies like this in our refrigerator with fragrant, tart little huckleberries. Now I understand why they charge up to $40 for a gallon of these things. It took us at least 2 hours of picking to get this much.
I'd tell you to come by and try some, but by the time you get here, they will be all gone!