It’s starting to become more and more real — at least from my perspective as a father-to-be — seeing the heartbeat, little beady black eyes, the brain developing and bearing some combination of our DNA. It’s quite remarkable. I know for Natalie it’s all-too-real, with the nausea being as bad as it is right now. Hopefully it’ll pass soon.

We also were given a slightly altered due date of April 3 and not April 1 based upon the latest measurements of baby with the ultrasound that we had. It’s pretty exciting though, having a spring baby in time for Pascha and all the festivities surrounding that. It’s going to be quite the special time indeed!

It’s nice to be home finally — the last week of our vacation was a miserable experience for me, struggling with an all-out ear infection. I know that Natalie’s friend Anne was probably upset that we had to cut our time short there, but the reality is that I was in pain and needed to see a doctor. With some antibiotics and ear drops, it took about a week and a half to clear out the infection and get to sorta normal again.

Sorta.

Then as if life wasn’t done throwing curve balls our way…

Yes, if you haven’t kept on my Facebook updates, my wife and I are now expecting and are about eight weeks along now and have guestimated that we’ll be delivering around April 1st. We don’t know a gender yet — it’s too early for that, and probably won’t know for another ten weeks or so — but we have some candidates for names. While we don’t quite agree on names for a girl, my mom was instrumental in helping us unanimously come up with a boy’s name: Christopher Michael, which oddly enough is what I was going to be named until they decided at the last name to make me a “junior”.

We had our first ultrasound a few weeks ago, and when I saw that little grain-sized spec with a heart beat that nearly started beating just a day before, I was filled with a sensation that I’d never experienced before. And maybe if it was only for a moment, a lot of my anxieties about fatherhood were set aside for the time being.

It is overwhelming. I tell people that I’m equally excited as I am terrified — terrified of the responsibility, but I guess excited about the prospect of experiencing a different kind of love that I’ve yet to experience: the love for a son or daughter. Fortunately, we’re not starting out with twins… so I’ll say a “thank you” to God for that. No need to overwhelm me any more than I already am.

Natalie’s been doing awful though, nauseous every day and has just recently started vomiting as well. Literally a day or two after she took the pregnancy test (July 25th) the nausea hit like a freight train and simple things — like riding in or driving a car and even sleeping — became difficult to endure because her nausea was so bad. She’s doing her best to do things like eat a lot of crackers, drinking lemon water, and other things we learned at our first prenatal class, but it’s still tough for her and she hasn’t been sleeping well.

But all this should pass in a few weeks — we hope.

Anyway, that’s the bulk of the change. The rest of the change is pretty insignificant by comparison. I’m finally dumping my co-located hosting service for a much cheaper, easier to maintain environment and am finally just hosting my own stuff and not giving free rides to design clients from my freelancing days. One less thing to manage.

Though, I did lose some data in the process. The version of cPanel/WHM I was using didn’t properly export the SQL tables and I ended up with a TON of empty SQL files. GRRRRR. So I’ve lost all my data for my beer brewing site (which I don’t write anything for anymore) and the Crash Effect blog. Oh well. I’ll miss having that data, but I’ll live.

I did manage to get my solo acoustic music website up and running and on a wordpress installation. I’m thinking of picking that up again but on a much more casual basis — maybe like spending Saturday mornings or evenings at the studio and just track a few things here and there. Lord knows I spend way too much time on World of Warcraft — probably a healthy thing to allocate a little time to something more fruitful.

Anyway, that’s enough for this week.

One last stop on our whirlwind tour, so Natalie can spend the evening and tomorrow morning with her best friend here in Iowa. We’ll be headed out in the morning and back by early afternoon.

I’ll be extremely glad to be home. I’ve got a persistent ear ache I’ve had for three days, and on-and-off-again headache (to go with it), and am in dire need to not be in the car and to have some extended me time after I get back to work this week.

Two weeks was just too much. These added few days that we’re still on the road, difficult.

We rolled into Salt Lake City last night around 6:30pm, both of us pretty well worn out, tired and just a tad cranky — or at least, I was the cranky one. I’m really tired of traveling and am ready to resume some normalcy to my life.

This evening we got into Estes Park by about 3:00 pm and had dinner at some Italian joint and are just taking it easy for tonight. In addition, we’re cutting our trip a day short and staying here just one night and forgoing the sight-seeing in the Rockies, since we’ve already seen them anyway and a dozen other mountains that look just like them along the way. About the only prominent mountain we didn’t see along our route was Mount Hood, which was covered by overcast skies.

Seven days for this road trip would have been perfect, ten days okay. But two weeks was just too much I think.

I’ll have the rest of the photos up when I get home. But tonight, I need to try and recover from this ear ache I’ve got and a persistent headache that’s followed me since Portland.

Not a whole lot to report on today, as it was pretty much a lay-low and take it easy day before our 12-hour drive tomorrow to Salt Lake City. We had lunch at a great bakery called Pearl Bakery complete with the artisan bread, and tasty ingredients like roasted eggplant and sun-dried tomatoes. Positively delicious.

Following the advice of a parking enforcement attendant, we checked out a HUGE new and used bookstore in the Pearl district of Portland called Powell’s Bookstore. It had several floors of books, each floor pretty large in size and a vast selection of new and used books. I’m not a huge bookstore person, but this place was massive and worth checking out.

There was a world beer festival going on nearby, but I didn’t think Natalie would want me going off and spending my evening at some beer festival while she sat in the hotel watching TV.

We stopped back at our hotel for awhile and then had dinner at some greek restaurant nearby. It was alright, but not worth blogging about. Oh wait, I just did. Eh, it wasn’t worth mentioning the name.

Anyway, it was a low-key day. On to Salt Lake City tomorrow.

After a leisurely start to our morning with continental breakfast at the Red Lion Inn in Astoria, Natalie and I went into the city center where I sat and caught up on e-mail over a mocha and scone and Natalie perused the locally-owned bookstores.

As the morning moved on, we drove down to Cannon Beach and spent a few hours there with lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall place that Cranky Sue’s or something like that. The food was pretty good, service friendly, but the space a bit cramped as they squeezed their restaurant in a tiny little house just a few blocks off the coast.

Cannon Beach was pretty nice and the coastline quite scenic. It was pretty packed with tourists and travelers alike, but still a nice stop.

Later we eventually checked into our room here at The Seaside Inn in Seaside, Oregon. It’s an unusual “hotel”, like a narrow, tall building just sorta wedged in between two other larger hotels. Kinda weird. And despite our room smelling a bit musty, the room is quaint, the bathroom nice, and the view is worth every penny. I just wish it wasn’t so cloudy right now so we could have a great view of the sunset over the Pacific. So instead we’ll probably go see a movie in town.

Anyway, that’s enough for today. We’re onto Portland tomorrow later in the day.

Our morning got off to an early start — checking out at 8 am and looking for a place to eat before our morning whale watching session with Five Star Whales and then the four to five hour drive to Astoria.

We had breakfast at this very cool little cafe called Sandwich Corner Cafe located just a few blocks from the port. The food was alright, but the mocha that I had was remarkable and made to perfection — a great start to the morning.

Afterwards, we walked around a bit to kill some time and eventually made our way to Five Star Whales and headed out with our group. I knew it was probably ambitious to think that it’d be this great whale-watching experience, but I think that it was anything but. Sitting near the boat captain, I knew that we were in for a long trip when all of the area boats were radio’ing into each other with no sightings at a number of the given locations. What I didn’t realize is that it would be an hour and forty minutes before we would see anything — and only gave us ten minutes to view the whales before we had to make our way back.

Ten minutes of whale watching. That was it, and they weren’t all that close either. It basically amounted to $10.00/minute of mediocre whale watching with an enthusiastic guide (excited that we even saw them, I guess), and a long, cold boat ride. If I could re-name their business, it’d be Two Star Whales… one star for the fact that they finally got us to see the whales, and the other, well, they were nice?

There was a point where they had to decide if it would be alright to go ten minutes long just to see the whales, and decided to do it for us. If we wouldn’t have seen anything, I would have wanted my money back — even if they don’t guarantee the sightings.

We saw a few orcas, grabbed a quick lunch at a cool Asian place called The Noodle Box, got back late to our ferry — which was also late — and didn’t make it back into Port Angeles until after 5pm, over a half hour late. On our way back, we drove through the northern end of the Olympic Mountains — a highly-scenic drive — and stopped for what was perhaps the WORST meal I have had my entire life.

Thinking that we were in for a cute meal, we stopped at a hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere, called The Hungry Bear Cafe. After dinner there, we know why the bears are hungry — there’s no way they’d eat there if they valued their life. I ordered their fried clams and it was the ABSOLUTE WORST combination of food that I’ve ever had. Between the powdered mashed potatoes, powdered gravy, fishy-tasting vegetables, excessively chewy clams, and a flimsy, slimy sorry excuse for batter, and the bagged salad, there was just no way that I could stomach the crap that was set before me.

After having seen several episodes of Gordon Ramsey’s “Kitchen Nightmares”, I’d be afraid to take a peek in their kitchen and where they keep their food. The food was clearly not fresh, especially the clams, which tasted decidedly frozen and weeks old.

I’m sorry, but when you’re just an hour’s drive away from the Pacific Ocean, there is absolutely NO excuse for crappy seafood. None whatsoever. And it didn’t stop at mine either. Natalie had a nasty burger and her fries looked limp and wrinkly.

About the only thing that was any good was the bottled Alaskan Amber Ale that I had.

After an hour of enduring that terrible meal — and surrendering $35.00 for said meal — we made our way towards Astoria and eventually arrived about 11:30 at night, the first real night driving that I’ve had to do besides our time in South Dakota.

Tomorrow… the Pacific Ocean!!

Sorry, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of any “eh” or “hoser” jokes. You’ll have to look elsewhere on the interwebz. Instead I’ll pass on a little information about Victoria and our experience here so far.

I think after our experiences today, I’ve come to value the idea of having a GPS device in the car for traveling. Local use? Absurd and only valid if your sense of direction is terrible. But so far, we’ve had a few situations where a GPS navigator would have been really useful with proper turn-by-turn instructions.

I like Google Maps a lot, but there are just times that what you see on Google Maps just doesn’t jive with what you’re faced with on the road; and today we nearly got lost in both Seattle and up here in Victoria because of Google’s fine navigational sense… or at least my ability to attempt what Google says is the logical path to consider.

Fortunately, I do have a good sense of direction and was able to keep us from getting too lost, and Natalie was able to assist in helping me find the desired street names, but it was just getting ridiculous at times and I just got a bit frustrated as well.

We arrived in Port Angeles a couple hours before our ferry left for Victoria, enough time to grab some coffee and a doughnut from a little shop called “Cock a Doodle Doughnuts” and then a quick lunch buffet at India Oven, where we had some really good and genuine Indian food, run by a bunch of guys that had VERY thick accents and seemed to know what they were doing. At any rate, it was great food, and if you’re ever in the Port Angeles area near the Olympic Mountain Range, stop in for some great, authentic Indian food. I think they’d appreciate your business.

Our ferry left for Victoria around 12:45 and we rolled into Victoria by about 2:30 or so and got checked in without any hassle. Our hotel’s really nice — Chateau Victoria — a bit too classy for our general fare, but it’s still nice. The staff have been helpful and friendly, and the rooms pretty big and comfortable. It’s definitely better than the ol’ Days Inn in Rapid City.

After getting settled in, we drove up for an afternoon at the Butchart Gardens, which can only be described in photos — it was the most ornate, diverse, and beautiful outdoor gardens I’ve seen for some time. We had what was perhaps the most expensive cafeteria-style dinner I’ve had ever… about $35 for the two of us — and left after dinner to get back to the hotel.

Taking the Gardens’ recommendation to go the “scenic” route back as indicated on their website (PDF file), we wasted about an hour and a half of driving time on this supposed “scenic” route. Most of the time we spent looking at a variety of homes, some gated with manicured lawns and gardens, some ordinary but nice… and eventually hit stretches towards the end where you could actually see the coastline unobstructed on Beach Drive. So don’t even bother with the whole top two-thirds of their scenic route. Just make your way down to Beach Drive, where you’ll be able to see the channel, the Olympic Mountain Range, and plenty of people enjoying the beach (on a nice day).

Tomorrow we go whale watching, and unfortunately it’s going to be a really tight itinerary for tomorrow. I had originally designed it to do the whale stuff today, but they were full and had to “squeeze” us in the morning. Now I get to squeeze in breakfast, checking out of the hotel, and quick squeezing in lunch and customs after the whale watching. Not quite what I had in mind, but oh well. We just go with the flow I guess. Not to mention practically spending our time back-to-back on boats. O.o

As I eluded to yesterday, I am starting to feel the travel wear and tear, checking into a different place almost every night with the exception of Seattle (three nights) and Colorado (two nights). I think when we get to Seashore, Oregon, I’m going to just sit on the beach the entire day in solitude and let Natalie go off and do whatever. I just wanna sit on the beach, and listen to nothing but the sound of the Pacific Ocean crashing in at my feet. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Hard to believe, but one more week left of vacation. It’s definitely been a long one so far, that’s for sure. I’m not looking forward to the last legs of driving — Salt Lake City to Estes Park, Colorado and Estes Park to Iowa City. Those are gonna hurt. I think beer will be required after those drives.

The sum of our day was driving around and exploring the towering Mount Rainier, which can be seen for many miles and into northern Seattle on a clear day. I’ve been there once before, was very impressed, and was ready for a return visit to take Natalie to Paradise (the visitor’s area that leads to the summit) and then further west towards Comet Falls.

The view was breath-taking nearly every stop along the road that wound around Mount Rainier, and words just cannot describe the majestic beauty and mammoth size of this mountain. Sure I’ve seen it before, but it’s just one of those sites that you could absorb all day and not grow tired of it.

We took the trail towards Comet Falls at around 3:00 in the afternoon, with roughly a 1.7 mile hike ahead of us and warned that there was a bridge out just .3 miles ahead of Comet Falls — what they failed to mention was the amount of snow you’d have to traverse to even get near the downed bridge.

It was a really hard hike, with a ton of switchbacks (as I recalled from my last hike up there nearly ten years ago) and rough terrain in some areas. There was also an avalanche from earlier this year with the evidence fairly obvious — massive downed trees and thick snow damns that covered some of the trailways. But after an hour and fifteen minutes of hiking, we reached our gear limitations, a place that it’d be much safer to have poles and strap-on spikes to get any further. Defeated, we hiked back to the car and made our way back to dinner at the Pyramid Ale Brewhouse and our last night’s stay in Seattle before launching off to Victoria, British Columbia.

I’m glad we’re doing this trip, and I’m getting to see things that I have either never seen before or has been too long since I have. But the travel is wearing on me a little bit and it’s requiring a little more effort to enjoy some of sights. Sound a little too much like whining? Maybe, but with over 3,000 miles of travel in a week’s time, I think you’d probably be longing for a bit of the familiar as I am — simple things like our cats, our own bed, my personal space, sitting down to a few mindless hours on my computer — simple things.

Well, off to bed. We have an early day tomorrow.

It’s our first full day in Seattle, and with a healthy night’s rest behind us we were ready to fill the day up with roaming around downtown Seattle, feasting our eyes on the merchandise throughout Pikes Place, and eating at a few of the establishments.

We started our morning out at Saint Spiridon Orthodox Church (saintspiriton.org) on the northern edge of downtown Seattle, near the flagship REI store on Harrison and Yale. By the looks of the building, it’s an old Russian Orthodox church (now Orthodox Church of America) that has stood through much with it’s worn, bright blue, white and brick exterior.

I’ve heard from other Orthodox about their experiences with traveling and participating in the divine liturgy elsewhere, how there are a lot of commonalities and it feeling like home. And while they’re right to some extent, there were a lot of unique things that made this place equally foreign to me — Russian language aside.

First of all, the choir was breath-taking and the music they sang was heavenly and perfect in every way. It was distinctly Russian in influence, so you could clearly hear that in the tonality, the way they sang their vowels, and in the various emphasis in the bass and tenor soprano parts. I wish I could have bottled up or recorded the sound and carried it with me wherever I went, it was that beautiful.

There were no pews, so the entire service we stood — all two hours of it — so it wasn’t for the faint of heart or the weak of legs. And all the old babushkas earned their seats with their many years, the right to sit through the entire liturgy. But the music, the sights, and the liturgy was nearly enough to keep me sustained through the service.

A few other differences that were notable — they sang their creed and the Lord’s Prayer (that was quite the beautiful experience), the apostolic reading was read by two women in English and then Russian, the sermon came at the END of the service instead of after the Gospel reading, and in addition to offering blessed bread after communion, they had some sort of wine/water mixture in little cups offered to us. I’m not sure what that was all about, but I followed along and grabbed a cup plus some blessed bread.

It was pretty tiring, standing for two hours, and made me appreciate the subtle differences about my home parish — namely being able to sit when the priest sings, “let us complete our prayers unto the Lord” — the cue that we’ve got another good 30 minutes to go or so. I also missed being able to participate in the blessing of the bread and wine in saying “AMEN” when the bread becomes Christ’s body and the wine becomes His blood. Instead, the Deacon did that in response to the Priest’s readings behind the closed gates with the curtain drawn. Yes, they also had a curtain behind the gates on the iconostasis. That was another unusual difference from what we’ve become used to at Saint George.

In all, our experience at Saint Spiridon was beautiful and unique, and I wish that we could have spent a little more time to take pictures, meet some of the people at coffee hour, and hear more about the parish — but we were hungry and had made a b-line to Pikes Place Market to find some lunch since we had skipped breakfast.

Pikes Place Market was hopping with people and there was a lot of buzz in the air with people bustling around buying wide varieties of fruits and vegetables, fresh-cut flowers, and watching the fish guys do their thing — or more accurately, stood around waiting for them to do their thing. With only three fish guys on duty and no one buying fish, I don’t think that they were up to the normal antics that everyone has come to associate with the Pikes Place Fish Market. So instead of it being an attraction to come and see, it just felt like another vendor to walk by with nothing special about it.

For lunch we feasted at Pike Brewing Company, where we had fresh hummus with hot pita bread, Natalie with her turkey sandwich and me with my fresh halibut and chips — of course, accompanied with a great weissen beer. I have to say, that my fish and chips was the best that I’ve ever had — the fish was extremely fresh, was light and flakey, and the batter was also distinctly different. The waitress said that it was “air fried” — whatever that is. But it was positively the best fish ‘n chips I’ve had yet.

The rest of the afternoon we hobbled around, saw different things, bout some Seattle Chocolates for friends of ours who used to live there (and of course missed being able to get them), and bummed around much of the afternoon.

I think both of us hit the wall, though, around 4:00 in the afternoon — between the afternoon heat, being tired from walking around, and seeing the extensive amount of homeless people looking for handouts, we were ready to head back to the hotel. Very ready.

Seattle just isn’t what I remember it to be, and while I’m sure they’ve always had a lot of beggars on the streets, it just seemed a lot more than I once remembered of Seattle. And that was just a bit difficult to deal with. When you’re on vacation, you’ve explicitly worked hard and saved your money to come and enjoy your stay at your destination — but then to have vagabonds from all sorts of backgrounds asking you for money, it does a few things to you… or at least it has for me.

One one hand, I feel ticked off — we’ve worked hard for the money that we have and for the time that we’ve been given to enjoy our stay in Seattle. And to be asked for our money of someone who probably has done little to find work, make efforts to get their life back in order, or maybe are just too lazy to do anything at all — I feel violated and disgusted. That’s the selfish side of me.

Then with what sum of compassion there is left within me — and if there is any at all, it comes from Christ or those I know who are like Him — I feel really awful about their situations, having to beg for money, food or help, and wished that I could do something that would truly help them out instead of just giving $5.00 here or there, and wondering if they’re just going to use it to liquidate their troubles away in a bottle of gin.

Conflicted, in a word. I feel conflicted about walking past them. And admittedly, I walk right past them without giving them a glance, and outright ignore their request for money. Only once did I give some spare change out this afternoon — and that was for a middle-aged man who asked if I could spare a penny or two for some art supplies, with a few used smaller sheets of canvases or something at his feet. In the back of my mind, I suspect he was just feeding us a line, but he was creative about his begging, so I gave him some loose change and kept walking.

Seattle sure isn’t what I had hoped it would be for us. We have enjoyed some great food, good beer, and seen some enjoyable things in Pikes Place, but on the whole it was probably more depressing than it was enjoyable. Nice vacation, huh?!

One more full day here and then we make our way towards Victoria, British Columbia for some whale watching, dinner, a nice night’s stay in the city there, and a few more things on the morning after. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll be glad to leave Seattle and move on. This used to be one of my favorite cities, and has always been held with some level of romanticized idealism in the back of my head. In fact, Natalie asked me on our way to Seattle if I’d ever want to live here, and my response was an enthusiastic “yes” — provided that I had the perfect job offer. But now I’m not so certain. It’d have to be a damn good job to get me to want to move out here. It just seems too crowded, dirty, and filled with so little hope in the people that fill the city streets. It’s pretty sad.

I think tonight we’re going back to Pyramid Brewing Company for dinner and should have my photos from today up later tonight. The ones for yesterday are up now if you’re interested.