Washington Day 4

I took another trail in our own personal rainforest the next morning.  This time Andy joined me.

I was determined to find a banana slug and Andy wanted to see a "sally" as we had dubbed the salamanders.  We ended up seeing plenty of each.

Do you see the little snail in the middle of this picture?

How many slug and fungus pictures can you handle?

I was just enthralled with all the little details underfoot!

We eventually made it back to the cabin and everyone was ready to go to the beach!

This is a view on our drive out onto the main road.  Every time we passed it Andy was hoping to see a moose.  No luck though :(

We took a short drive to Rialto Beach for the main activity of the day.  It was lovely!  The ocean is so therapeutic.

After a few minutes we took Ben back a ways to sit on some driftwood while the other kids looked for rocks and played a bit in the waves.

This old fisherman was there the whole time we were and I enjoyed watching him do his thing that he probably does very often.

Ben ended up snuggling in and falling asleep on my lap.

The three older kids went off on a mini adventure and walked south along the shore.  They were gone for over an hour.  It was super pleasant to just sit there and enjoy the sound of the waves and hold my buddy (even though my back and behind did get a little sore sitting like that for so long)

While driving in the area we kept passing these large fields of tree stumps and foxglove.

They were so lovely and finally I just couldn't stand it and had Andy pull over so I could get a good picture! 

(And he took a picture of me taking my picture)

These were from another one down the road that I just took from the car...

Some wildlife at the cabin...

More wildlife at the cabin....

Just kidding!

We played a round or two of "Four"...

...then took a break with intentions of coming back for a night full of games before hitting the hay...

(Matt taking a break)

...and then the power went out!

Are you serious!?!?!

We contacted our host who directed us to some lamps and things we could use.  She also responded saying it looked like it was a planned outage by the city until 6 a.m.  What?  She asked if we had seen anything posted on the door that day (apparently that is what they do for these maintenance outages that occur every now and then)  No, we had not seen anything to indicate this would happen.

She apologized and made sure we were okay and then said we could talk in the morning about how they could make it up to us.

It was 10 p.m.   We were worried about our food in the fridge/freezer, the load of laundry we had just barely put in the dryer and to top it all off, we found out the water ran on a pump and so we had no running water for the night either!  To be honest, I was pretty bummed and I let it ruin my night.  We tried to salvage things and play a game but my heart wasn't in it.  We went to bed (luckily we had some bottled water we could use to brush our teeth and told the kids not to flush the toilets) and tried to get some sleep.