Summer Recap - Washington, Lair

To finish off summer vacation - or rather, extend it, because school actually started the week of this trip [Master L was very 'distraught', I'll tell you!] - we went west, to visit some old friends.

On the plane, Mrs. L 'discovered' Biscoff cookies. Her eyes lit up. She asked me to see if the flight attendant could give us any more. Little did I know HOW serious she was. She made sure to save the web site address for later ordering [turns out they sell them at a store near our house, though . . so that saves about a million dollars in shipping fees!]. OK, the damned cookies ARE good, I admit it!

Here's the obligatory shot of Mt. Rainier that everyone takes from the plane on the way into Sea-Tac: As my mother once famously declared - after a trip to the Grand Canyon: "I wouldn't give ya nothin' for the West. It's just a bunch of rocks."

On the way out of Seattle (I have no idea where this is now) we stopped at "The Glass Museum".
All of these displays were outdoors:

Our destination was this house, that our friends have been building with their very own hands for several years now. Neither of them had done anything like this before, and I have to say it looks really nice.

Trouble is (at least from a visitor's standpoint), it's located at least an hour from ANYTHING and TWO hours if you want to go to a big city. Great for living, less so for a tourist! Every morning and late at night there were deer in the yard. There were also LOTS of (non-venomous) snakes. It was funny - Master L had never encountered a snake in the wild, and he jumped about two feet in the air when he saw the first one near his feet. "DAD!!! THERE ARE SNAKES!". . . after I told him that they aren't the kind that would bite, it only took about an hour before he was chasing them to pick them up. They would open their mouths to threaten but never actually bite. He had conquered the snakes.

The people who live across the road (but not close by, by our standards) came over to say they were going away for the week . . . and asked our friends to feed their chickens and take the eggs from coop. So now we had a daily project: before breakfast and at dinner time we'd trek up the hill and across the road. Mmmm. . . eggs still warm from the hens. . .

Soon we would discover the 'joy' of getting anywhere in the west. Comfortable car seats are a must. And it became stunningly obvious why there were little roadside espresso trailers dotting the countryside. The REAL reason Seattle is known for coffee is, if you aren't wired up you could never drive to where you need to go. My theory, anyway.

We settled in for a bit before venturing out into this brave, new world.