Vacation in Washington

Jordana and I recently finished our 3rd year of medical school and had 2 weeks off to visit the great NW. We devised a pretty hectic itinerary, from visiting my Mom's cabin in Hoodsport, crossing the mountains to visit our dear friends Kristen and DJ and stay with my brother and his wife in Mazama, and then back again to the west side to visit my dad and his wife Christie for a few days on their new sailboat. It was quite a trip and we were blessed with incredible weather!
First we headed to Hoodsport, WA and Lake Cushman where my mom has a cabin and went for a 2-day backpack up to Lena Lake. I thought the hike was surprisingly easy, but Jordana disagreed!

The night before setting off on the trip we were packing our backpacks and realized that we were missing a key component of the stove we had brought. This left us scrambling and buying a camping percolator that we could use to boil water over the open fire. To prevent the percolator from getting all charred, we wrapped it in aluminum foil. Unfortunately, this slowed our boiling process to about 2 hours!

Lena Lake

After coming off the mountain my mom and her friend Terry set up an incredible day of boating which started off with kayaking on Lake Wynochee

Then sailing on Lake Cushman (my mom and Terry)

Then back to lake Wynochee for some trout fishing at dusk. We caught four altogether and they were tasty!

We then headed across the Cascades to the Palm Springs of Washington, beautiful Yakima where we had a lovely visit with our friends Kristen and DJ (and their daughter Cora).

A quick visit in Leavenworth, WA, which is a bavarian village situated right in the heart of the Cascades.

Then hiking on Rainy Pass on the North Cascades Highway with my brother and his very pregnant wife Jacqueline.

Then an alpine climb with my brother up Liberty Bell, which is the tall one on the right. This was my first alpine climb and it was quite an experience.



At the top of Liberty Bell, 7760ft

Then back to the rainy side for two wonderful days of sailing on the new boat, a 27ft beauty! We didn't actually sail much, and we didn't make it to where we had planned, but we still had a good time.

She enjoyed this position way too much.

AOA Induction Banquet

This past Wednesday night I was officially inducted in Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society. This is quite an honor as only roughly 1/6th of my class will eventually be inducted, and there were only 13 of us inducted after 2 1/2 years (out of 190 classmates) and are called junior inductees. The rest of the inductees will be inducted during our fourth year and are referred to as senior inductees. This is quite exciting for me and has been something I've been working for since the first day of medical school. Along with board scores and letters of recommendation, being AOA is one of the bigger things residency programs look at in deciding whether to offer you an interview or not. So hopefully we moved that much closer to heading West!

This is really a very posh event and it provides you the opportunity to hobnob with some of the real "giants" of the program. It's very intimidating and exciting at the same time!

This was desert, some sort of chocolate and orange gelato tower. Very tasty!