Seattle and beyond Sept 24th-27th

Searching for a real bed and a hot shower we showed up on Mike's sister, Elizabeth's doorstep in Tacoma Washington. She and her family have just recently moved into a really nice house right on the Puget Sound.A sampling of the view from the house

One of the days we went down to the sound with Patrick and Katie. Mike was trying to teach Katie how to skip rocks, and Patric was having a really good time burying things and then digging them back up. Oh yeah, we saw some seals too. Every now and then you would see a head pop up and then disappear again.

Then we watched a pretty sunset and headed back to the house.

One of the reasons we wanted to stay near Seattle was that Amber was flying in to visit us. We picked her up at the airport on Sat (the 27th). From there we headed out of the city to let Amber have a taste of outside climbing. About 45 minutes later and without too much difficulty we found the place we were looking for. Then we wandered around in the woods for another half hour or so, and managed to actually end up where we were hoping. Not bad considering the directions didn't mention anything about the tromp through the woods. Then we started climbing

This was a neat climb called tunnel of love, where you actually climb through a hole created by a chokestone. The only problem was that the whole bottom part of the climb was really wet, which made it a lot less fun.


Amber stemming like a pro

The wall we were on was called interstate- and unfortunately that was what you heard a lot of, it was a pretty view anyway though.

It has become Mike's new favorite pastime to make a whistling alien noise- action shown here

That's a loooong way down

Safely back on the ground

I think Amber summed it up best when she described the climbing as a "horizon expanding experience". We had a really good time and even found our way back to the car without trouble.

We drove back to Tacoma to spend the night at Elizabeths and made a very yummy pizza for dinner.