On the Road Again

We left the house, Friday July 24th at 4:00, to start our trip off to Montana and Yellowstone Park. I’ve been working all week to make sure we were ready to go! I’m so excited to see family and friends and have an adventure with Mike and the girls.

Our first night we' stayed at Wanapum State Park just past Ellensberg. We only traveled about 3 hours the first night, but then we didn’t have as far to go the next day. The campground was pretty open (and full). They kept us up late into the evening with their laughing and hollering.

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On Saturday morning we packed up the tent trailer and then stopped at Ginkgo State Park to find an “earthcache”. That’s a new one for us. Earthcaches are similar to geocaches, but you don’t actually have a hidden box to find, but answers to questions instead.

That is a rock Anika is standing on, not a log. This is right on the Columbia River. It was super pretty!

This park holds a petrified forest so we had to go for a little stroll to find out which trees were which species to answer the questions. It took us a while and it was hot, but it was interesting.

After that we were off to St. Regis, MT. We got to meet up with our friend Scott (Mike’s best man) and his family. They came up from Missoula to meet us. The dads got to fish on a river that Mike has been dreaming of fishing ever since he was in college. The moms and kids sat by the river and played. The water wasn’t too cold and the kids got right in and swam. They loved it and got along with the other kids really well!

Kelby wasn’t feeling very well, so that was a little bummer.

James and Tegan seemed to get along great! The kids all played while I made dinner for our company. Irene brought a delicious dessert she had made. We took them on a wild goose chase walk to find a geocache. When we got to where it was hidden there was a guy hanging out, so we had to distract him while Mike looked for the cache. (You aren’t supposed to let non-geocachers see you find a cache). Mike found it, but had lost his pen to sign it. The poor kids got pooped out by the time we were done.

We had a quieter night’s sleep that night except for the thunder and lightning. Me and the girls slept through that, but I guess Michael enjoyed watching it because he couldn’t sleep. He got up early to go try fishing again, and I packed up so we could be off again, headed toward Billings.

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