We'Re NuTS

As we contemplated what to do with our free Saturday, we checked the weather and saw there was only a 25% chance of rain until noon in today. So we ate a leisurely breakfast and hit the road around 9:30am, grabbed a coffee (bk), chai (mk) & choc milk (ak), filled the tank with gas and drove east, with NW Trek in our sights. We should have outfitted the car with a snorkel first though. It poured, as seen in the photo below as we first arrived.

So we ran to the Cheney Center and crawled through logs, learned about salamanders & snakes, and did a caterpillar craft.
Gopher snake (same as a Bull snake).
Then we ran to the tram for the big animal tour.
I'd like to say this was a bugle. . .but it was just a rainy-day yawn.

Thar's deer owt thar!

Pappy & The Ladies.

During dinner tonight, back in our warm, toasty house, we asked Abee what her favorite animal was. The first thing she said was the baby bison.

Golden.

Three minutes after this photo was taken, she was asleep in the car. The hot topic on the way home was a name for Baby K #2. Still undecided. . .but the choices are narrowing. 11 weeks to decide.

Weekend in Forks

Facebook has taken over as the easiest place to share pictures, but there's something about a blog that seems more like a journal. Someday I hope a company like Shutterfly makes it easy to print blogsites. It's nice to look back, reminisce, and see where God has allowed us to grow physically & spiritually through life's experiences.

A couple weekends ago we went to the Olympic Peninsula for a three-day vacation. On the way we stopped at The Olympic Game Farm, where all kinds of crazy critters, like this groundhog, live.

Square-lipped rhino.

Yup. Griz.

This is the only place I've ever been where they encourage the feeding of omnivores much larger than myself.

He is, indeed, waving. For bread.

The fence was four feet high. Tops.

For those of you familiar with the Twilight series, yes, we did read the first book of the four-part series. For those of you not in the know, it's a vampire book that every high-school girl in America has read. And many adult chics too. I suffered through it, somehow. OK, Melis has a way of making even a book like that entertaining. Thanks for the good read'n, Babes ;-)

Was that a vampire?! Or an Ewok?

For the four years that we've lived here, I've wanted to get some pictures of the fog in old-growth forest like this. The forecast had called for rain & possible fog most of the weekend, and I wasn't disappointed.

A Washington icon - Sol Duc Falls.

The water was raging today, more so than the previous times we've been here. It was actually quite a feat not allowing water droplets to build up on my lens.

It was getting pretty dark as we came back. So dark that this picture was a 60-second exposure.

It rained all day the second day, so instead of a trip to Shi Shi beach, we opted for the Hoh Rain Forest. This place gets 150 inches of rain every year. There were 7 in the previous three days to us being there.

And it rained most of the time we were there. . .but Abee stayed happy, warm, & dry under the protection of the hood of the backpack.

The sitka spruce is the dominant tree in the area, but there is a smattering of maples also, see behind us here.

She really took a liking to bridges on this trip. In fact, it was hard to get her to stop going back & forth & back & forth & back & ok, you get the picture. Thankfully we weren't on any kind of schedule.

We had lunch in the Hoh campground, within 50 yards (sometimes a lot closer) of three bull elk.

La Push.

Still on day two, it was dry here at Second Beach, but being on the coast, the wind was blowing like crazy. The tide wasn't quite in our favor, but we did spot a few starfish and thousands of anenomes & muscles.

We hiked around 4 miles total that day, and Melis, during the last half mile or so, started having pretty strong braxton-hicks. I thought I was either going to have to deliver Baby #2 myself, or race back into the Forks clinic to have Dr. Cullen (for those of you well versed in Twilight) take care of business. But we took it slow, ordered in pizza for dinner, and it passed. The contractions, that is. Not the baby.

On our way home we tried to go the back way to Lake Ozette, but our TomTom took us on a bunch of dead-end logging roads that were fun & beautiful (and rather remote), but didn't get us to where we wanted to go. So we bailed on that idea and drove to Hurricane Ridge instead.

This was not Abigail Joy's best day, but as long as she was swinging around & flying through the air, she was pretty happy. So we got a good workout.

I snapped this just as we were leaving, and less than a minute after this image froze the moment in time, the clouds rolled in and ensconced the view of the mountains.