Sunday Stroll in the Woods

Kyle is on a business trip, so Kari and the kids came to our house for the weekend. We invited Todd, Betsy, & Seth to go for a hike with us on Sunday to the Ice Caves by Big Four. We are just getting started on our 1 mile hike to the ice caves.
To keep Annika and Seth motivated to keep walking, they would run a little ahead and hide somewhere, then jump out and yell "Boo!" to scare the adults. Over all they did very well, it was a mile each way, and Seth only had to be carried a short time.
Since it hasn't been a very warm summer, there weren't many caves this year. The one in the background was the biggest one in this section, there was one more that was a little bigger a little farther up, and a couple that were barely started forming. Even though there weren't many caves, there was a lot of people going up the trail, and a lot of them had dogs with them, luckily most of them were well behaved. It's been quite awhile since we've gone up there, but I don't remember there being so many people the other times we've gone. The other thing all of us had forgotten was how cold it is when you get up to the snow. Kari brought jackets for Saben and Annika, but the rest of us didn't bring anything. When it's so warm when you start up the trail, you don't think about needing something warm to wear when you get up to the snow.
Posing in front of the ice cave.
5 very cold people and 2 slightly warmer ones.
Even though they were cold, all the kids wanted to throw snowballs at the adults. Seth has a chunk in his hand that he threw at his mom.
Time to rest, eat a snack and enjoy the scenery.
Seth enjoying sitting on Papa's lap.

Trip to Texas - Part 1

We flew to Texas on Saturday to visit Ken's Mom in Georgetown, which is a little north of Austin. We were surprised to find that it wasn't much warmer in Texas than it was at home. So no suntan from here, maybe when we get to Phoenix! Sunday morning Ken's sister Wendy, her husband Dale and daughter Meagan were able to come by and spend the day. We had a lot of catching up to do since we hadn't seen them in a year and a half.
Monday, it was 40 degrees when we got up at about 8am. Brrr! It did warm up enough later in the morning, so that Ken and I went to short sleeves while we were out geo-caching. We found our first 2 caches right away, but the third one we looked for, took a lot of time. Ken is checking the coordinates since we weren't having any luck locating it.
Mom V. is trying to find the cache among the trees. The title of the cache was "Hanging Around", so we were assuming it was hanging from a tree, we just couldn't find the right tree. We finally gave up, went back to the house for lunch and a rest. Ken checked the info on the cache we couldn't find and found that someone had put in some slightly different coordinates for the same cache, so off we went again.
We finally found the cache hanging from a tree branch, but we were almost ready to give up before Ken spotted it. We looked for one more along the trail that had been placed by the same person and again had no luck and found different coordinates available if we decide to go look again.

Weekend - Aug. 15 -17

We went to Wenatchee and Leavenworth this weekend. Our great-niece Lara was in a Shakespeare play "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream". It was performed by kids between the ages of 3 and 14, and they did a very good job. Of course, the fairy named Pansy, (played by Lara), was the best in my opinion. I haven't been exposed to much Shakespeare, so I had some difficulty at times understanding what was being said, but I was able to understand it enough to follow the story and throughly enjoyed it. We were very impressed at how well this group of kids performed this difficult play.

Instead of staying in Wenatchee this trip, we decided to spend the rest of the weekend in Leavenworth. We didn't know it at the time we decided to do that, but Leavenworth is usually 5 degrees cooler than Wenatchee, not that it matters that much when the temps are in the 100's! We played a round of golf on a putting course, first thing Sat. morning before it got to hot. It's like miniature golf without the windmills and on real grass instead of carpet. It was a lot of fun, but we were starting to get hot by the time we were done. So, we decided a drive in an air-conditioned car sounded good. We drove up the Icicle with a stop at a salmon hatchery that was up that way. We took a break after lunch and watched some Olympics in our hotel room, before heading out to brave the heat again, while doing some geo-caching. We discovered that Leavenworth has a nice river walk path, that we had never known about. We found some caches along the path and enjoyed sitting by the river with our feet in the water to cool off. The last event of the day was attending "The Sound of Music" at an outdoor theater. It was very well done and it was fun to see it performed outdoors with mountains in the background.

Sun. we did some more geo-caching as we headed home, this is a picture of me sitting by the river up Tumwater Canyon as I decode the geo-caching clues. We found 7 different caches in Leavenworth and Tumwater canyon, and once again discovered different areas we were unaware of. The worst part of the weekend was the trip home and having to face the slowdowns of the traffic through the small towns along Hwy 2.