We’ve only gone hiking a few times since moving here, which seems insane since we’re surrounded by opportunity. There’s no end to hiking in the Puget Sound region. There’s more state and national parks than I could keep track of. Of note, is that the Cascade mountain range to the east and the Olympic mountain range to the southwest, both provide tons of hiking. There’s a number of parks in and around Seattle, outside the mountains, that still provide good views without much travel. But the mountains are within a couple hours.

We went to Wallace Falls with friends on Sunday. It turned out to be rainy, Saturday was much nicer, and we had expected the reverse, but the mist made the very mossy hike kind of fresh and almost more remote feeling. We ate at the top of the upper falls and had a nice time coming back down, running half the way mostly off and on.

We’ve walked around Discovery Park over by the sound when we first moved to Seattle. For being so close to the city, this was a nice escape. And Bellevue is home to Cougar Mountain which has steeper grades and a more hiking feeling, even though to get any distance you end up zigzagging around the mountain.

Strategy has been busy lately! I’ve been honing back up on HTML and CSS lately, and found myself asking an A+ student today what the difference between and “Absolute and relative URL” was. He looked at me quizzically wondering what a URL had to do with the command prompt. It’s mind bending explaining CSS in one lab, going to the next and working with batch files, and helping a student troubleshoot active directory replication across sites in yet another. I’m encouraging more students to come in and spend time in the labs, something the Strategy offers that noone else around Bellevue seems to. If they do, there’s certainly going to need to be more of us!