We went to Bend a few weekends ago, to attend the wedding reception of Rebecca and Mike. When we originally booked the trip, we were supposed to fly in Thursday night and leave Sunday morning. Due to some additional developments with childcare, jobs, and whatnot, we ended up going about a half day earlier. We rented a pretty sweet house via vrbo and took a 45 minute Alaska Air flight save ourselves the 6-7 hour drive each way with a three year old.

The reception itself was pretty low-key, in part because of the couple and in part because the actual wedding was a few days earlier with family. There were a handful of kids there and Dom had a great time jumping around the dance floor and throwing his hat with the other boys around his age. We were fortunate enough to have childcare, so Dom went to bed around 9 pm and we stayed out until the end of the party.

Unfortunately, I woke up Thursday with a tickle in my throat that would develop into a full blown cold or the flu over the weekend. We didn’t do nearly as much in Bend as I’d hoped because I spent a lot of time in bed and even more time sitting around resting. Probably the worst part of it is I just recently got over whatever it was, but not before infecting Dom and Melissa. None have really done that much except be very sick in the two weeks since we got back. It was a nasty, nasty bug – the worst any of us has had for a long time.

Bend is an interesting place. It was cold, insanely dry (despite it snowing), and very reminiscent of a winter resort town. There was a lot of breweries, good food, and keeping warm by all the various fire pits Bend had to offer. The whole vibe of the place is to dress in really nice (and expensive) outdoor wear – at least that’s what we found of the tourists that appeared to be around us. It was hard to tell if we ever really around locals; I suspect not much. My cold really impacted our ability to explore, which is unfortunate. Everyone was really nice, though. It reminded me of how Seattle used to be when we moved here eight years ago.

We would go back to Bend, but it’s not super practical at this point in our lives. There are so many places closer to us in Washington (and Oregon) that we could drive to easily. Heck, we could even drive to Idaho in less time than we could drive the Bend. Flying is too expensive, even though tickets are somewhat reasonable. So, yeah, Bend! Congrats Mike and Rebecca.