A Rainforest Outing

Vacation, stage 2 = The Greater Seattle Area

In the last 4 days, here's a sampling of what I've accomplished

- got to catch up with Alexa and JD
- got to catch up with Baby Hank (haven't seen him since he was 3 weeks old... now he's going on 8 months!)
- read a couple of books
- was in traffic for a long, long time
- learned not to always believe the driving directions from the talking GPS unit... it might really, really want to help you avoid traffic, but it can't really help
- watched a couple episodes of House (still have to keep up to stay on track for finishing all four seasons before the new season starts in September)
- watched The Bee Movie
- took a walk
- explored Anderson Island, a ferry ride away from Alexa and JDs place - it was a fun excursion into the wilds to find the trail that JD read about in someone's blog. So, he read the blog, then attempted to track down the trail using the latest in gps technology, and we found it!

A few photos of our escapade...

This is evidence that the sun is NOT always brighter on the other side of the forest. It was definitely raining on the 20 minute ferry ride (that we had to wait an hour for instead of 10 minutes because we were unaware that the ferry had switched to the "Rhododendron Schedule," duh, as we should have known).



Exploring the upper deck

The end of the short hike -- you can see people camping across the way - they'd kayaked. At low tide, according to the blog read by JD, you can walk across to that little spit o' land. We missed that window.


Using the cool new tripod that has wrap around legs that will, um, wrap around things like tree branches so you can take the family picture.


Or wrap around things like, say, Kristin's head - the platform used for this photo


But not for this photo! Aren't they the cutest!!


Hanks first nature lesson: "This is a thistle."


Hank's second nature lesson: "Yum, slugs taste real good."


Entertaining baby on the way home. Alexa really think the "Chubbles" trick keeps him quiet...


Chubbles didn't work, so they let him drive instead...


I must report we made it safely. And he's not really driving. We were still on the ferry. With the engine off. Not going anyway. Well, going somewhere, but not by the power of our car. The ferry's power.