Rouse Family Adventures

Brandon's been working as an engineer at Paccar for over ten years and decided it was time to shake his life's etch n' sketch up. It's official, he resigned mid-August and every day is a Friday for him now, except the weekends which are still the weekends and Wednesdays which we have dubbed as weekend Wednesdays. His new calendar looks something like this. You can take the engineer out of corporate life, but you can't take the engineer out of the man. He's been enjoying solving his own problems and creating new problems when there are no problems to solve. I had no idea there were so many problems, but Brandon hasn't been bored.  1: Pile of boat wood. 2: Saw milling with Alex 3: cutting out the shapes  Being the creative builder he is -he bought a bunch of wood and is building a 16 foot boat. Why 16 feet? Because our garage is 17 feet long. Annabelle has been an accomplished assistant and has excelled at moving and hiding his tools around the garage and sugg...

In a previous life if someone told me that I wouldn't climb for nearly two years I'd tell them to go pound sand and maybe suggest a place where they could stick it. After having Annabelle it was clear to me that teaching her cool shit was more important to me, so I put climbing on hold. Totally worth it! Now I have a super awesome two year old girl who makes me laugh at her stories all day long, loves the outside, and learns something new every day. The perfect kid for Brandon and I in every single way.  None the less- climbing is something that really makes me feel like I'm alive and I've missed it. In December I started gym climbing again. All summer long I climbed the crap out of Mount Erie - really climbed Erie until the cows came home.     Holly and I decided it was time to re-cut our teeth at alpine trad climbing -without someone leading us- and we put our sights on Cutthroat Peak. The first scheduled attempt was scrubbed due to the family being infected with a...

This year's annual bike touring trip took us 320 miles along the sunshine coast in Canada.  Day one took us across the Canadian border through Vancouver. The border crossing on bikes was easy-except Brandon was  randomly selected and received a mail in COVID test box with instructions. We stashed the kit and carried on with the plan to camp at a Bike Packing Host's backyard in West Vancouver. Biking through Vancouver was more fun than driving through Vancouver-mostly gravel paths and beautiful traffic free greenways took us to our "host's address". Initially, we had the wrong host address and surprised some Asian lady wearing a bathrobe who wasn't expecting two stinky bike tourists and a toddler on her porch.  She shook her head violently, flicked her fingers in a shooing like motion  as if we were Jehovah's Witnesses and stated "No Phil live here!" Turns out we were one block off - we found the right address and our Canadian hosts that night wer...