So it was made apparent to me that my friend Laura had somehow made it through living in Colorado and never been formally hiking! Blasphemy! Therefore a plan was formed! We would all make a pilgrimage to Hurricane Ridge to break in Laura properly (and eat amazing food along the way!)

The first stop was the Oak Table Restaurant in Sequim, WA. I only got an iPhone photo because I was too busy stuffing my face with chocolate chip and bacon pancakes. I shit you not. Chocolate AND bacon bits. and not the crappy bacon bits either. Genuine chunks of their amazing slabs of bacon. It blew my mind. Food will never be the same for me again.

Oak Table Cafe. Go here. You won’t regret it, there’s nothing less than amazingly life-altering on the menu. I promise. I even made this whole thing a link so you can’t screw it up or ignore it.

So now that we all had hiking fuel we headed up the mountain. It’s about 18 miles from sea level to the top and only dips down slightly once. Jason wants to ride his bike down the whole thing. I want to run UP it. Cause I’m crazy like that I guess.

We were out there for a few hours taking picture of pretty much everything.  Laura, sam and I are all amateur photographers and Lawrence I think was a Japanese tourist in a past life.  Every single flower felt like a rock star.   It was a tad ridiculous.

Amazingly enough after our ridiculously awesome breakfast, we were all hungry on the way home. Apparently hiking burns calories… who knew? 😉 So we stopped at Fat Smitty’s. Now, I’ve driven by this place about a hundred times now and it always looked like one of those really shady diners with the burgers dripping in grease and fried everything. I was totally blown away. The burger was really really good! Good enough that I’ll probably bring my finicky burger-loving mother here to dine when she visits next! Not greasy at all, just the right amount of patty, and not slathered in sauce just for the hell of it. Excellent! The joint itself definitely had character. Lets just say if you ride up in a military uniform on a Harley you will be welcomed in with open arms.  If you drive in with a Prius covered in Obama bumper stickers… well.. just leave because there’s a lovely coffee stand up the street that would love to discuss politics with you. There are also dollar bills coating the ceiling. If the ceiling was a stripper, it would have been very successful.

All in all a pretty darn good way to spend a saturday afternoon with friends! 🙂