Tuesday after our morning of runs, bike rides,and doughnuts, we said good bye to Portland and set off for Washington. The plan, and I use that term loosely was to see Mt. St. Helen on the way and then head up to see our friends the Davies outside of Seattle. I hadn't mapped out any details in advance for this stop, so I just programmed in Mt. St. Helen's visitor center into the GPS and off we went.
We soon entered Washington and got off the highway on our way to what we thought was the visitor center. I knew it was quite a ways off the highway, so I didn't get too worried as we got further away and headed up into the mountains. Well, a good hour or so later I realized we how'd made a big mistake. The iPad maps program took us to the south entrance to the park and all the visitor centers are off the north entrance, and as they say in New England, you can't get they-ahh from hee-yahhh. There was no road to get there with out back pedaling to the highway, a good 40 miles away and then heading another 20 miles up the highway.
So we made the only choice possible and fingers crossed we headed to the south entrance. We saw there was an information center at a place called Ape Cave. We decided to stop and find out what there was to do at this part of the park. Talk about luck, it turns out Ape Cave is a lava tube that you can explore. The kids, especially Kellen, were psyched. So we gathered up flashlights and warm jackets and headed down to explore.
It was a pretty cool cave and the first we toured on our own. We decoded to do the easier upper tube, which was a 3/4 mile walk out and back. As usual our kids began chatting it up as soon as we hit the cave and never really stopped talking. It was 42 degrees in the cave and we told the kids we would go as far as they wanted but I think Greg and I would have been happy to turn around after about 15 minutes. It was quite cold. The kids however wanted to go till the end so we did the whole tube.
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| Cave exploring. |
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| Mission accomplished. |
After that we headed a few more miles to a spot where you could get some excellent views of the mountain. It was beautiful, still snow covered even in August. By the time we were finished, it was 6:00 and we had several hours of driving ahead of us. We made it back to the interstate and drove up 15 miles or so to a town to get some dinner.
We stopped in a town called Longview. Funniest site that day in the picture below.
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| Squirrel bridge crossing road. |
We found a diner for dinner, apparently known for their oversized cinnamon rolls. We opted for breakfast for dinner then it was back on the road. We finally rolled into the Davies driveway after 11:00 pm, by far our latest arrival of the trip. The kids were already in pjs, having gotten them ready at our last as stop (one of the cool things about RV travel), so they went to bed and we got to spend an hour or so talking with Simon and Deborah.
It turned out to be a long day but I felt lucky that it worked out as well as it did, considering we are I the unplanned portion of the trip, the adventure wasn't half bad!
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| Giant cinnamon roll. |
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| Truck headed back to Alaska. Note three spare tires on roof, but none are mounted on rims. Also note the spare muffler. All tied down with super bungee cords. |
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