Last week Lisa and I visited Las Vegas to see some friends (Tania and Manesh). We had a wonderful stay with them in Summerlin and spent one afternoon visiting the Valley Of Fire State Park.

This is a world-renowned location that’s around an hour from the Las Vegas strip. It’s basically 40,000 acres of bright red Aztec sandstone outcrops nestled in gray and tan limestone and contains ancient, petrified trees and petroglyphs dating back more than 2,000 years.

Definitely worth a visit, and we picked the perfect day, blue skies and sunny but not ridiculously hot! If you get the chance to visit, go, it’s worth it the scenery is amazing, but if you go in summer wear a hat and take water – you’ll need it.

We particularly liked their “Heat Warning” sign that tells you… “You Might Die”!

Here’s a link to the Valley of Fire State Park website.

Obviously this is a landscape photographer’s dream 🙂. I won’t bore you with all the pictures I took, but here are a sample:

There is a restaurant in Washington State (in Woodinville) called the Herbfarm.

It is without doubt the best restaurant I’ve ever been to, and I consider myself very lucky in that I’ve been to some amazing restaurants all over the world.

This is DEFINITELY a special occasion place, as it’s just too expensive for mere mortals to go that regularly, but if you like a great dining experience and consider yourself a “foodie” I’d totally recommend you visiting if you get the chance.

The restaurant is a farm to table establishment, where they grow most of the produce and have special relationships with a number of local vendors to provide amazing ingredients to create a truly unforgettable meal.

If you like to eat and get out in 20 minutes, this is not for you. You arrive at 7 and are greeted with a cocktail (if you get there a little earlier you can get a tour around their gardens and taste some of the produce off the vine!).

Then service begins and you are lucky to get out by 11pm, so this is an experience, not just a meal.

After the first course, the owner and head chef comes out with the wine sommelier and they tell you about the menu and pairings. This includes telling you how they came up with the menu and where the ingredients came from. They introduce you to all the staff for the night and the meal continues.

You can purchase a wine pairing for each course, and if you aren’t a wine person you can try their botanicals. ( Trust me have the wine 🙂 )

I’ve been fortunate to visit the Herbfarm a few times now, and this year for my birthday I decided to invite James and Abi (and Aidan, Abi’s other half) to a birthday dinner. So, Lisa and I flew to Seattle (as we are now in Colorado) and Abi and Aidan flew in, as they are based in Fresno, California. We stayed at James’ for the weekend and on Saturday night we went to the Herbfarm for dinner.

We made this a “joint” birthday celebration as James had just had his birthday too.

The food was amazing, the wine unbelievable, and someone sensible (wasn’t me) took some pictures of each course. Lisa had the botanicals and James, Abi, Aidan and I had wine.

There were 10 courses in all, and you get a little menu book to take away showing you everything you had.

Below are pictures of the menu and each course.

Again, if you ever get the chance, and LOVE food and wine, treat yourself to an amazing evening.

Here’s a link to the restaurant’s web page. The Herbfarm.

Here’s the menu:

Here’s the family just before dinner:

And here’s the courses in order…

This weekend Lisa and I flew to Fresno to attend Abi’s “White Coat Pinning Ceremony”

This recognized a phase in Abi’s doctorate where she has passed sufficient exams to start her clinical rotations. She has almost completed her first year (of three) and in two months starts gaining practical experience as a Physical Therapist at an outpatient practice.

The weather in Fresno was really nice (around 70°F or 21°C) warm and sunny so we got some great pictures after the ceremony. The ceremony was nice (and short) and her professors helped her into her white coat and gave her a pin – the White Coat has to be given back on Monday lol.

It was great seeing where she studies and we saw where she spends all her time (either in a classroom, a lab with her cadaver or the library where she studies)

The sad part of this bit of her education is she doesn’t really have any down time over summer and is expected to work in a PT practice in-between school semesters without any pay!

This feels very wrong to me, a lot of the students in the doctorate program are borrowing money to pay for their education and pretty much for 3 years they aren’t given the opportunity to earn any money. All the clinical rotations are considered part of their schooling/education. Yet the PT Practices get a student PT for free!

Oh well, it’s an important part of the process I guess and it’s only 3 years.

Anyway, we had a great (short) visit, and it was lovely to see her in Fresno.

Here are some of the pictures we took over the weekend:

I have a funny story that I thought I’d share as it proves that sometimes you can try too hard to do what you think is the right thing, and it comes back and bites you. It’s still funny though so enjoy…

In March of 2024 we moved into our new house, it was a new build and everything was great, but the back garden (yard for my American friends) was just mud. This was a horrible pain as every time Harley (our French Bulldog) went outside, she’d bring back into the house a ton of dirt. So clearly a priority was to get the back garden finished.

We hired a really good designer and gave her a brief, that basically said, low maintenance, lots of plants that were indigenous to Colorado (so they’d survive the winters) and consider water conservation, let’s not use all the water in Erie in summer to keep plants alive.

Our designer came back with a really lovely design (it’s a post on this site if you want to check it out) and we started work in June, finishing late July in time for an August birthday barbeque to celebrate the finished work.

One decision we made was to put in a special type of Bermuda grass that was very hardy, and required little mowing and little water – perfect right? The Bluegrass everyone else had was much cheaper but needed to be mowed every week and required gallons of water in summer, so we figured while this was more expensive to put in the Bermuda grass, in the long run it would be worth it.

The new grass went in and it was lovely, in fact if you look at the posting on the finished garden, that’s the Bermuda grass.

In spring of 2025 Lisa noted that Harley was spending a LOT of time licking her feet, something she hadn’t done when we lived in Washington. So, she had her tested. Guess what? Yup, she’s allergic to Bermuda grass!!!!

Firstly, how come it took us half a year to notice Harley was having problems – that’s pretty bad ☹️. In the end we made the call that there was only one option. We had to have the Bermuda grass pulled up and bluegrass put down! We obviously checked that Harley would be ok with that and of course she was fine.

It appears that not only is Bermuda grass expensive, but once it’s down it’s a terror to pull up (it really takes root), so the cost to pull up the almost brand new Bermuda grass and put down Kentucky Bluegrass was over $5,000.

So, this summer, I mowed every week and watered like there is not tomorrow (and paid the price for all that water), while I watched Harley continue to lick her feet.

Life sometimes sucks!

Told you it was funny.