Chapter 6: American Girl Dolls!

Way back in May when Ella was first told that her birthday present from Grandma and Grandpa would be a trip to Seattle's American Girl Doll Store, she (and Delia who learned of her gift on this day too) could think of little else.  When they were asked what part of vacation they were most excited about, they quickly answered, "Picking out my American Girl Doll!"  They've totally tattered the catalog looking through it so much and both Ella and Delia knew exactly what doll she wanted.

Delia was super excited to get Kaya, the Native American doll.  Ella picked out McKenna, the girl of the year, whose story includes details like she's a gymnast from Seattle-- perfect!  The store was huge and impressive and included every single little thing you could ever want to make your American Girl Doll just like you.  Cute things like musical instruments or sports gear and crazy things like head gear or an allergy-free lunch set!

After being purchased, Kaya and McKenna were set free from their boxes and invited to dine with us in the cafe.  This was adorable!  The dolls were given little seats that attached to the table and tiny teacups!  Everything was pink and the menu was full of fun treats.

Hot chocolate with whipped cream, cookies with milk and strawberry smoothies were ordered and we all had a nice time sitting down together.

A trip to this store was a complete indulgence and once-in-a-lifetime experience.  The girls have not put their dolls down for a full week now (you'll see them in each picture from here on out!) and love, love, love this new gift from Grandma and Grandpa.  But even more, I love the memories they made sharing this special date with Grandma.

A full day of playing with friends and the excitement of the thing she had been most looking forward to being fulfilled wore Ella right out on the drive back to our Gig Harbor house!

Each doll comes with a book telling their story and I also love that Grandma and Ella read McKenna's story together this week. 

If you would ask the girls, they'd say that Kaya and McKenna are new members of our family.  And they are treated as that-- riding in the car with us, eating with us, having special beds right by the girls', watching the Olympics with us, etc.  I just know this super special gift will be cherished and kept forever!

Chapter 5: Old and Dear Friends

The Washington leg of our Pacific Northwest Tour began wonderfully when we spent Sunday, our first full day in WA, with some old friends from CA.  I've written before about the special bond Dave had with a group of other youth pastors from the area several years ago.  Not only did these guys work great together and learn so much from one another, but their families all entered the next stage of life together.  In the same year, we each added a baby (3 of them girls!) to our families.  Dave is the only pastor who remains in CA and we miss our friends, but we're so happy to know each was called to a new ministry where God is working powerfully through them!

Matt and Gail took a call to a church in the Seattle area a few years ago.   It was a blessing to worship at Matt's church, hear him preach, then spend the day at Matt and Gail's house catching up.  Sheri and Ryan now serve in the Midwest, but Sheri is from Washington and was going to be in town with her kids the same time we were!  A big reunion was planned.

Ella will still tell you that her favorite part of vacation was playing with Anna (Matt and Gail's daughter) and Kiera (Ryan and Sheri's daughter).  It's been about 5 years since the girls have seen each other, but they quickly bonded and had a blast playing hard all day!

As you can see, since we were last together in CA, we've added a few more kids to our families.

After church and a delicious lunch and a long time to chat, we were treated to an excellent Jana Alayra program by the girls. 

When I think of the great variety of things we saw and did last week, I'm so happy that a visit with these dear friends was added to the mix.  It was a real highlight!

Chapter 4: Home for the Week

We spent 3 days on the road, taking our time getting to our destination for the week, which was this UH.MAZ.ING house in Gig Harbor, WA.  Once again, we used VRBO and have to say this is probably the best we've ever done!  The house had so many great features, but my favorite was probably that it was big enough to share with Mom, Dad and Kyle for the week!

We arrived first, settled in and then picked up the family from the airport.

Besides the outside deck, this is the room we spent the most time in.  It was a big open kitchen and dining room.  I made and froze all our meals before we left, so cooking was easy and sitting down together to eat a nice dinner each night was a highlight, as were the intense games of Trains we played here once the girls went to bed.

In our master bath, we had a huge jacuzzi tub!  The girls got to asking if they could go for a swim in the tub and many, many baths were taken!  In each of the beautifully decorated bedrooms were comfy king beds for all of us too.

The king beds, big jacuzzi tub and open, airy dining room were all lovely, but at the top of the list of reasons why this home was fabulous was its right-on-the-water location.  And I mean RIGHT on the water.

Every single day we sat on the deck, reading, playing with the girls, eating dessert and watching the wildlife.

And oh, what wildlife!  Twice we saw harbor seals swim right past and every day, several times a day, we saw bald eagles flying overhead!  The trees around the house are nesting grounds and we lost count of how many eagles we saw-- fishing, in trees, soaring, perched and watching us. 

At dinner last night we were talking about our favorite vacation memories and Delia said, "I know Mommy's...it was all the bald eagles!"  Yep, this was possibly the coolest thing ever!

Chapter 3: Multnomah Falls and Mt. St. Helens

As I researched Oregon, I kept finding images of this famous double-decker waterfall.  Oregon is actually jam packed with waterfalls, so I was excited to see that this one, Multnomah Falls, was just a few miles outside of Portland, a city we were driving right through!  A quick detour led to a lovely morning admiring another thing of natural beauty.

Multomah Falls reminds me a lot of Yosemite Falls, but over the place where the top falls become the bottom falls is a bridge you can walk across!  And getting to it was just a short uphill walk.

After our stop at the falls, we officially colored another state off our map when we crossed into Washington for the first time.  Just into Washington and just off the freeway is the Mt. St. Helens Museum and Visitors' Center.  We admired a pretty view of the mountain behind Spirit Lake then popped inside to get all our questions answered.

We watched another interesting movie about this volcano's recent eruption and shared our memories of watching this on the news since it happened in our lifetime.  Do you remember?  We learned a lot at the museum, notably, what Mt. St. Helens looked like before its top blew off in 1980, how it has erupted several times now and is still considered active and how you can actually hike to the crater and feel the heat at the top!  The girls were nervous about being here and didn't gain any peace after watching the live footage of Mt. St. Helens' eruption and aftermath in the movie, but they can tell you quite a bit about volcanoes now!

Chapter 2: Crater Lake

As we left California, we were giddy about passing Mt. Shasta-- a REAL mountain! What we see from our home are hills in comparison.  The first time we saw it, we squealed at its size, snow cap and majesty.  When we saw it again on the return trip home, we had just spent a whole week looking at mountains, each one more impressive than the one before, and it was a little less exciting.  Funny how that happens, huh?  I love this picture of Ella in the car with Mt. Shasta in the rear view.

Day two of vacation had us cross the Oregon border for the first time and see one of my favorite sights of the trip-- the deep, blue waters of Crater Lake National Park.  A movie in the visitor center taught us that Crater Lake was formed when a huge volcano eruped so voilently, the entire mountain was actually decimated and disintegrated into the ground, leaving behind this deep basin.  It happened almost 8000 years ago and since has been filling with rain and snow, making it the deepest and bluest lake in the USA. 

Since Crater Lake is pretty much just a mile-deep hole in the middle of a mountain range, there is no beach access, no water inlets and no sea life (except the 3 species of fish that are stocked in the lake).  It was as interesting as it was gorgeous and we couldn't have been there on a prettier day.

 Crater Lake gets about 44 FEET of snow each winter and, again, we picked just the right time to pass through and see the park in its entirety.

Just a bit snow remained which, of course, we had to play in!  Never before had a snowball fight in July!

Delia has a funny snowball fighting technique.  After nailing you in the face at point blank range, she hides behind a tree and taunts you with "You missed me's!"

We spent our second night in a hotel in Eugene and got a good flavor of the organic, natural attitude of Oregon when we strolled around their downtown.  This was yet another great day in a long line of great days to come...

Pacific Northwest Tour, Chapter 1: Lassen and Burney Falls

Hello blog readers!  We just returned from a week and a half of one of our best vacations ever and I am bursting with pictures and stories I can't wait to share!  The 14 hours of books on CD that we listened to as we drove inspire me to tell our own Pacific Northwest Adventure in chapters.  I'll post just a few chapters of our vacation story a day, so you can keep up. :)

This vacation idea was born when we were interviewing for a church in Chicago this winter.  Anna asked, "If you are to move, is there anything on your list you haven't seen yet?"  Dave and I thought of the two states to the north that we had never set foot in and how we'll never be closer than we are right now to explore Oregon and Washington, so we started planning a grand road trip.  This vacation did include a ton of time in the car, but we broke it up with lots of stops and made sure activities, movies, books on CD, hotels with swimming pools and restaurants with play areas were aplenty!  The girls did a phenomenal job on the ride and overall lots and lots of new, happy memories were made.

Our very first stop on our very first day was to a new National Park-- Lassen Volcanic National Park.  Here we loved putting on sweatshirts and learning all about the volcanic history of our state.  Lassen has a whole range of volcanic mountains and, in one park, each type of formation can be found.

The bubbly, boiling sulfur pools were really interesting, but extremely stinky.

We realized over and over that we picked the perfect week to take this vacation.  The end of July is one of the only times that all these high-elevation roads are completely open.  We were able to drive from one end of the park to the other and loved taking in that mountainous scenery.  Sometimes a curl of steam from an active and open crack would rise into view and that was cool too.  I think we climbed (in the car) up to about 8000 ft. on this day.

After Lassen, our next stop on the first day was Burney Falls State Park, also in Northern CA.  We had heard these falls were beautiful, but our breath was still taken away when we walked up and saw them for the first time! 

The hike down to the base of the falls was mild and we loved just sitting on a boulder at the bottom, listening to water crash, feeling mist spray our faces and watching the beauty of God's creation!  Being absolutely awestruck at God's awesome creation became a bit of a theme this week. 

The first day of our Pacific Northwest Tour started our whole trip off on a great note!  After a night in a hotel, we were on to a new state and another new National Park...

Colored States

One thing on our Summer Bucket List was to color new states on our USA maps.  Dave and I have kept and compared colored maps for a while, but I just made Ella and Delia one and switched us all to digital.  Here is what each of our travels around the nation looks like thus far (including the states we'll hit for the first time on an upcoming vacation!):

Ella and Delia have seen 6 states-- a median of their ages!

Jen has seen 25 states-- exactly half (and all the good ones, I believe)!

Dave has seen 34 states-- only 16 more to go!

My rules are that in order to color a state, you must have a vivid memory of being in it (so no "I think I once drove through the corner of Rhode Island...") and flying over does not count, nor do airport layovers.

So, looks like a vacation in either Kansas or along the Northeast Coast is in order for next summer! Or maybe we'll finally do that Yellowstone trip I've been dreaming about...