Day 31 - Drive home :(

No trip through Wisconsin is not complete without a stop at the Mouse House.  Good cheese and fudge.  We picked up some cheese, fudge and sandwiches there and took them on the road.  We made it home around 9:30pm and found the house in good order.  Our cat sitter went beyond the call of duty and mowed the grass and picked up the cat vomit of which there seemed to be no end to.  Thank you Paula.
Boo to the cats.

Where does all this stuff go?

I need to go to work tomorrow so many of the post-trip unpacking tasks will have to wait until the weekend. (I actually ended up working Saturday so many of the tasks are still on-going).  The mound of mail to process is overwhelming.

All good things have to come to an end and sadly the epic journey is over.  It's been fun.
The reality of our daily life is starting to set back in.

If you made it this far in the Blog, then I applaud your persistence.  Hopefully it has been entertaining while also serving as a journal to help us remember what we did in July 2013.

The Wefels

Day 23 - Chetzemoka Park

Today we went to a lovely little city park in Port Townsend, called Chetzemoka. The main attraction of this park (for us) is access to the water, and to a sandy beach with wide tidal flats. We arrived lat in the morning, and the tide was way out. Initially it was foggy and eerie (as the wind blew over the sand, it would make misty wisps):

but then the sun burned off the fog.

Paul and the kids got to work building a castle/fortress, and a series of streams and reservoirs to drain the ground around the castle (I helped with streams - my favorite part). Notice the substantial sea wall:

Here are some of the hydro structures:

But no matter how well we build, we can't hold back the sea forever. Eventually the tide came rushing in; that's when the real fun began, of frantically shoring up the walls, trying to delay the swamping of the castle.

The sea won, as it always does in the end.

We followed up with a late picnic lunch in the park, then back to the house for more fun with cousins on the beach. I drove Jack and Sandy to the ferry to catch their flight the next morning; only one day left for us at the beach!

Day 22 - Stay at home

B woke us up early this morning with a headache; she ended up getting sick to her stomach. So we made it a quiet day today, and stayed up the hill (didn't want to get anyone on the beach sick, especially since baby Toby was still there).

In retrospect, it seems as though she had just overdone it. She ate a hearty breakfast and lunch, with no repercussions.

We had promised Aidan a hamburger for his birthday yesterday, but ended up with odd mealtimes (plus the burger place we were planning on was closed on Sunday). So he got his burger lunch today.

Day 21 - Birthday Boy

Today we had a nice, low tide in the not-too-early morning, so we went for a long beach walk.

Cassie holding a sea star

Cassie holding a moon snail she dug out of the sand 

The boy forgot his shoes!

More tubing

Cassie holding Toby

Brianne holding Toby

The birthday boy gets to blow out his candles

We finished the day by seeing Monsters University at the drive-in theater in Port Townsend.

Day 20 - More Beach Bumming

Plenty of kids on the beach (and boats)

More tubing fun (on one of the few overcast days)

Paul's cousin's new baby, Toby. 

Day 19 - Tube Hair

I'm just going to post a highlight picture or two from each day to catch up. As Paul said, it's all about playing on the beach, one day really runs into the next. Hooray for camera phone documentation!

When you pull the boy behind the boat for half an hour or so, the wind and salt water do interesting things to his hair:

Here he is demonstrating how sharp the spikes are.

On a related note, all three kids are doing a good job of acquiring their summer blonde hair, and have become ridiculously tanned.

I'm still learning how to take panoramic pictures with my phone. This one's blurry on the right, but you can see the sunset view.

Day 6/7 Addendum - Ambush! and sliding on snow

A snowball fight on July 6. How awesome is that? I play the traitor in this one.

Kids sliding on snow, July 7.

Day 11 Addendum - Rest area wildlife

These rodents (pika? don't know for sure) were at a rest area in Idaho. Obviously they're pretty used to being fed. In case the video doesn't work for you: there were dozens, and they made a sharp, high whistle sound.

Day 15,16,17, 18 - The Spell

There is something about beach life I just can't put my finger on.  Once you are here, you don't want to leave, not even to go on small excursions, which doesn't bode well for all the plans we had to visit places while at the beach. :)  Before you know it, you have been here a week wondering where all the time went.  It is a wonderful way to live.

The kids are totally in love with the place.  Once they eventually wake up, they are hopping to run down the hill to Great Grandma's house.  Over the last few days they made cookies with my Aunt Donna, did lots more kayaking, swimming, jumping off the dock, fishing, playing in the sand, roasting smores, and watching some TV with Great Grandma.

Katrina and I went to Port Townsend for a few hours and walked around the city, visited a nice bakery, checked out chezemoka park, and had fish tacos at a taco stand in the marina.

On Day 17, we did manage an excursion to Ft. Flagler.  We packed a lunch and headed out to do some hiking around the island and follow up on a rumor that there are ripe blackberries to be picked near the Ft.  

Thanks to the fun beach and sand cliffs we didn't make it very far on the hike.  We did have a good view of Port Townsend and Admirality Inlet where the big ships come in.  At one point I saw what looked like a drone fly overhead, possibly from the airstrip at Whidbey Island or maybe a personal aircraft.  I didn't have enough time to get a picture before it was gone.  The blackberry picking didn't go well as we weren't adequately prepared.  I forgot that to pick wild blackberries you need long sleeves, pants, gloves, and insect repellent.  While there were some ripe berries, there weren't enough to justify the suffering so we abandond that mission.

Day 18 was more beach playing.  I had a project to repair the patio umbrella - the cord for opening it had broken.  In the afternoon I used my Aunt Penny's bike to bike the Larry Scott trail into Port Townsend.  The trail is well done and very scenic.  It's about 7 miles into town but its all downhill there and back ;-).  Got a good view of the PT paper mill and read a little about its history then started the climb back to Discovery Bay.

Day 14 - More fun

Ah shucks, more of the same today.  Perfect weather.  The beach slowed down today as everyone packed up to go home and prepare for work the next day. But there was still time to form a floatilla, crack leftover crab, and play around.

The end to another perfect day

Side note:  It was dusk and I was walking down the driveway to my Aunt's house to borrow a bicycle. I was daydreaming about something when I almost ran into a doe standing in the driveway.  It was a little more than arms length away and it looked at me like I was in its way.  Eventually, the deer moved and I fetched the bicycle.  She was still in the front yard when I headed back.  The animals are getting pretty bold.

Day 13 - Fun in the Sun

The weather has been absolutely perfect.  Clear skies and 80 deg temps.  The beach comes alive on the weekends as people come in from the city to hang out at their cabins.  Woke to the view I never get tired of - Olympic mountains framed by water.  The girls started the morning by picking cherries from the trees my parents planted.  Dad created an elaborate fence around the trees to keep the deer away and put copious amounts of mardis-gras beads on the branches to keep the birds away.

My Cousin John and his wife AnnaJo and newborn Toby came down.  They brought their boat.  My Cousin Andrea and her husband Rod and their kids were here as well as my Uncle Bill and Aunt Donna and of course the reason for all of us, my 92 year old grandmother, was at the center of it all.  Rod manned the grill and whipped up excellent Salmon steaks and my Uncle provided freshly caught crab.  Donna and Andrea are masters at feeding large groups of people and had prepared dishes of food,  nobody went hungry.

We saw a bald eagle pull something out of the water and fly back to its nest.  Several Eagle families have taken up residence around the bay and I hope to see more of them while we are here.

These girls are ready for action!

The kids enjoyed the bay.  There was tubing, knee boarding, playing on the raft, jumping off the dock, and kayaking.  It was cool to watch another generation do the things I use to do when I spent
summers here.  My kids have already done things that I didn't work up the nerve to do until I was several years older than they are. Some things have changed.  We used to have jellyfish fights, they have water balloon fights (The little moon jellyfish don't come around anymore - I wonder why :).

rafts, kayaks, oh my.

Girls and a beach friend ready to tube 

Working up the nerve to jump.
 Seems higher when you are up there.

Day 12 - Ah, the beach.

The long drive yesterday was worth it.  What a day today.  The kids were up early and eager to head down to the beach.  My Aunt and Uncle and Grandmother had already moved back in to the beach house from wintering in Tacoma.  I am always amazed at how much nature changes things over time.  Having views of the beach every two years really makes the changes standout.  The levels of the sand, the number and size of rocks on the beach (and the increase in barnacles on the rocks), the amount of driftwood pushed up, the appearance or disappearance of jellyfish, crabs, bullheads, etc.

Sadly there are also the human-made changes - lots of trash in the water and on the sand.

 Cassie and Brianne made it their mission to clean up the beach and they did a great job.  C&B also took rapidly to the sea kayaks/stand up paddleboards (SUPs) and used their newfound SUP skills to help with the litter cleanup.  When I say "lot's of trash" I may be exaggerating.  I think anything more than zero is a lot :)

We were so absorbed in playing that I failed to take any pictures.  I think Kat took some on her phone but I don't have access to those yet. (ed: here you go. -Kat)

One of our favorite things to do at low tide is to make "streams" in the sand. Our first one this year was a rather larger engineering feat, with a series of terraced, cascading reservoirs. Can't wait for the next really low tide so we can do even better.

Day 11 - The push west

Not a lot to report today.  We awoke with renewed energy and did get going before 10 for once getting on the road by 9:40am.  We had 10+ hours of driving today to get to the beach.  The drive was uneventful.  We stopped at a rest area in Idaho for lunch.  Free lemonade and cookies.  The restrooms were odd in that the stalls had no doors and everything was made of steel and welded in place. Perhaps to deter theft?  We caved to the kids and had dinner at a Burger King in Silverdale then we made it to my parent's house at the beach by about 9:30pm.

Near Snoqualmie pass, we encountered some constructions, with signs advising that there would be delays for rock blasting later that evening. We asked the kids if they would like to stick around for the explosions, but strangely, they preferred to continue on to the beach.

Day 10 - Yellowstone Cont'd

Maybe this is why it takes so
long to get going in the morning?

Woke up, breakfasted, and vowed to pack faster but we were still on the road at 10am.  We decided to go around the east side of the southern loop and up the west side of the northern loop and exit out the north entrance.  We thought we would be able to see most of yellowstone in a couple days but I believe it would take at least a week to do justice to everything Yellowstone has to offer.

Something cool about boiling mud.

Saw some mud pots, paintpots, hiked to a waterfall at the grand canyon of yellowstone, and saw some more mud pots and some wildlife then it was off to ??? (we didn't have a solid plan past this point :)  While driving through Yellowstone it was neat to see how the ecology changed as we headed north.  Evidence of the massive wildfires from 1988 were everywhere but the forest recovered with new growth trees everywhere.

 We stopped and ate dinner in Bozeman and decided at that time to grab a hotel in Butte for the night to restore our energy.  Some quick pricelining yielded us a room at a reasonable price.  The family voted to push on tomorrow to our final destination of Discovery Bay, WA (hence forth referred to as "the beach") instead of stopping at Mt. St. Helens or Ranier for a couple days.  Our recent experiences have taught us that we really need to spend more than a night or two in a spot to begin to really explore that location.  We might go camping in the Olympics while staying at "the beach".  I want to camp close to a flowing river for a night or two, not sure why, just seems like it would be fun.

Lots of Bison, Deer, and Elk

Waterfall at the canyon.

Almost forgot the gratuitous
car top carrier shot!

Day 9 - Yellowstone

Woke to the sound of a thousand car doors opening and closing as people retrieved their breakfast food.  Thanks to the bears, as we have been reminded hundreds of times by the park,  food has to be stored in a vehicle or bear proof box located in the vicinity.  Despite our efforts, we were unable to attract a bear to our site ;-)

very cool vanagon passed us in the parking lot
The paint says it all.

We were up and mobile by 10:15am and set our sights on seeing the southern loop of Yellowstone.  We had a false start thinking we would hike to the Lone Star geyser first but opted out after seeing the trail map and figuring out it would take us close to 3 hours round-trip.  Instead we headed on to the Old Faithful show where we knew would would see many different geysers and thermal features in one area.  We arrived and managed to find a parking spot in the enormous parking lot and made it to Old Faithful in time to see it erupt.  We then walked the boardwalk and had really good luck arriving at the gysers right before they erupted.   The whole walk was over 4 miles and took most of the day and we ended up pretty tired.  We did end up seeing old faithful erupt three times during our walk but the most impressive geyser was Grand geyser.  We took hundreds of pictures of thermal features and I can't decide right now which is worthy to post here.

Steam bath anyone?

We realized we didn't have the time or energy to see anything else on the southern loop today so we headed back to camp.  Our campsite was really close to yellowstone lake so we found a trail leading to the lake and explored the shoreline as well as a sand bar that extended out into the lake.  Back at camp we setup the slack line, made a fire, roasted brats, dogs, and smores.   Later that evening I tried to use one of the precious shower tokens you are required to pay for when you pay for a campsite only to find the showers closed.  If anyone needs four shower tokens for yellowstone let us know.  Tomorrow we will try and get going early.