FitBloggin' & Trout Lake Farm

I’m still catching up on sleep from my weekend at FitBloggin’13. We got back after a 12 hours drive late on Monday night and my sleep patterns haven’t caught up from our fun, but sleep-deprived weekend! Chris and I both attended this conference for Fitness, Wellness and Healthy Lifestyle Bloggers in Portland OR. The event was hosted at the gorgeous and rather luxurious Nines Hotel right on Pioneer Square in the heart of downtown.

We actually arrived a day early to the event and took a tour hosted by Nutrilite to their Trout Lake Farm in Southern Washington. 

Whilst I may have hesitated that the day might have been festooned with sales patter it was probably the highlight of my weekend. From the moment we boarded the bus at noon on Thursday to getting dropped back at our door later that night we were nothing but pampered by our wonderful hosts. The drive from Portland to the Trout Lake Valley was around 2 hours along the Columbia River, stopping en route at Multnomah Falls for a quick photo op’ and enjoying probably the best packed lunch ever along the way to Trout Lake. The valley sits in sight of the majestic Mount Adams and is only around 7 square miles and is entirely organically farmed with no threat of overspray or pollutants. It was such a beautiful serene place, lush with green and abundant fields of crops. We were met by the farm manager and took a quick field visit into the…well, fields! We saw crops of echinacea, lemon balm (OMG – how amazing did this smell – I picked a few leaves to just try and suck in this fabulous scent!) and others, plus a few crazy moments of ‘see how many people you can fit on a combine harvester’. There was something about the sky and the clouds that day that made everything so dramatic – I think I snapped around 100 photos at Trout Lake alone! After some refreshments back at the farm building and a quick fix of wifi (this was the funniest thing about travelling with a bus load of semi-pro bloggers – everyone was on social media on their phones and mobile devices every other moment!) Nutrilite blew us all away with an outrageously generous gift bag (An Athleta bag which has just become my new favouite bag evah btw!) full of their products! Literally hundreds of dollars worth of supplements! I’ll be excited to try them out once life has settled down (because right now no amount of supplements is gonna fix the over-indulgence I enjoyed this last weekend or 3!!). After bidding farewell to the farm we were back on the bus via Hood River and the 3 Rivers Grill for an early dinner.

3 Rivers Grill – oh my! Firstly I gotta say what a funky little town Hood River is – lots of older brick building and steep streets perched high along the shores of the Columbia River. The 3 Rivers Grill served us a fabulous 3 course dinner with wines from Mt. Hood winery. I had a salad to start, entrée of Steak and 2 desserts (perks of travelling with a husband who doesn't have a sweet tooth!) – a fruit panna cotta and a chocolate moussey-cake thingy! All paired with a lovely Pinot Gris. Our hosts from Nutrilite sure knew how to pick a good restaurant – this is exactly the kind of place I would have hunted out if we’d been travelling on our own.

After a fun packed and thoroughly enjoyable ‘lazy’ day (just what we’d needed after our 12 hour drive down to Oregon from BC the day before) we were delivered back to our hotel in time for conference registration and name-badge decorating. (where we picked up another goodie bag full of stuff; tshirts, cereals, nuts, protein powders and bars, sweat towels, socks, coupons (picked up my free packets of Babybels and Laughing Cow cheeses on the drive home!),  from all the other conference sponsors – Amana, Attune Foods, Reebok, Enell, SoyJoy, Blue Diamond Almonds, Jumpsport to name just a few!).

We finished our evening relaxing and enjoying a drink at the trendy rooftop bar atop the hotel - checking out the fab views, sipping margaritas and enjoying the cool summer evening breeze - aaaahhhh, bliss!




There is so much to say about my experience at FitBloggin' I'll be writing more about it soon!

I'm linking this post up to Jill's Fitness Friday