Visiting Family in Lakewood, WA

It was close to 10 AM by the time we got ready to leave for WA to visit Tracy, Kristine and the grand kids. One good thing about the trip up was that we got to drive on a stretch of road that was new to us, and one that we would have driven on Tuesday when we leave for Cody, WY. This stretch took us from Lincoln City to Portland, and we decided to forget that route for Tuesday because of all the small towns we have to go through to get to I-5. Instead, we will go to Salem to pick up I-5 - a little longer overall, but it has to be faster. The trip took over 5 hours with a couple stops and lots of traffic as a result of construction on the freeway between Olympia and Tacoma. That stretch alone took us almost an hour when the normal time should be about 20 minutes.

I was disappointed with the pictures I took so the ones here are only a few of the approximately 45 that were taken - almost all of them of the kids. We only visited at Kristine's house yesterday so we won't see Tracy until today. The pictures below though are of the kids. The first one is of Harmony and Airen as we arrived:

The next one is a shot of Gabriel, the new baby that is now 7 months old:

We left Kristine's house at around 8 PM to go check into our motel room and we took Harmony with us to spend the night. What a joy it is to see her growing up. She is a very popular girl in her (pre) school, both among the teachers and the students and she is a very happy and cheerful child. We went to the IHOP restaurant next to our motel to grab some dinner before we settled into the room. It was pretty late so it turned out to be more of a "breakfast" than dinner, but it was a fun time with Harmony:

Harmony had a scratch on the side of her face from a fall in the driveway, so some of the nice pictures weren't so nice with the scratch being visible. I hope to get some better pictures this morning when we go back to Kristine's. Hopefully, I can get some good ones of Kristine and Tracy too.

Our plan is to leave around 2 PM and get back to Lincoln City in the early evening. We have to work 2 full days before we leave for WY on Tuesday, and that leaves little time to organize for our trip. If we had really thought about it more, we wouldn't have volunteered to work the days that our managers were off. We could have used those days for a more leisurely trip. Oh, well...