On the Waterfront

This day could not have been prettier for a ferry ride to Bainbridge. It was incredible. My stomach was still (I know, can you believe it?) queasy from yesterday, but I hung in there because I LOVE boat rides. Ironic since I don't really love the water, but I like to look at it, just not be in it. It was a bit of a fiasco getting a parking spot (seriously, at least 30 minutes of driving around and around and around...all the lots were full and the side spots are 30 minutes only) but once we found one it was totally easy! It helps that I freely admit I'm a dork and don't know what I'm doing. So you just go up to the window and say, "Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing. Can you help me??". Surprisingly, the man behind the glass DID have a clue and had apparently run into other people like me. He was totally on it. Twelve bucks later (see? aren't we glad we saved that twelve bucks from parking yesterday?) we had tickets and could join the crowd. Here is the weird part. Montana prefers the inside of the ferry. So we rode inside. He said he liked it, just wanted to be inside. Whatever Dude.

1. two (2!) car dealerships just out there. Not near a town. Just out there. Separate from each other.

Geocaching: a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache. (courtesy of geocaching.com)

Sean and Montana had four "travel bugs" they needed to place in a cache. A travel bug usually looks like a military dog tag with a serial number printed on it or it can be a specially designed coin. The cache is a container of some sort that has at the very least a log book. They can be very tiny (micro cache) or regular. He had picked up these travel bugs over a year ago and we haven't traveled so I said Montana and I could take them with us. We could log a cache in each state we hit and then drop them off in a cache in Washington. Silly me. This was so not as easy as I so casually said. Sean, in his fashion, worked diligently to take the hard out of it by putting "waypoints" in the GPS unit so we could just look for one in our area. The first two, in Utah and Nevada, were fairly easy to find. Although the one in Nevada was on the other side of a fence on the side of the interstate. THAT was a good time. Over 30 minutes of climbing around in the sand and dirt to find the darn thing. You KNOW Sean would have found it in like~ 10 minutes. We forgot California (remember the drive??) and Oregon was apparently too difficult for me. We looked for three different caches there and couldn't find one. That is unusual. Especially since Sean chose easy ones for us. But success in Washington! We did finally find one~ in a swamp. The name of it was the "Forgotten Bench". It had a hint of 'the bugs will eat you alive' or something like that. HOLY COW! They weren't kidding! We almost gave up but I really really wanted to do this and we had come SO close. Oh my gosh the bugs. They were the biggest mosquitoes I had ever seen. I envisioned them lined up 10 at a shot waiting for their turn to snack on us. Getting irritated, you know? Checking their little skeeter watches, hands on their little skeeter hips, "come on! leave some for the rest of us!". Damn things. It did feel pretty good to find it and complete that task though. We skipped Idaho cuz it was dark. We have already done Montana so all we have left is Wyoming. I'm not sure Montana (the kid) is up to it. He's still feelin' the stings and he's kinda bitter.

The rest of the day was driving to Missoula. We got out of town much later than we wanted to but the drive was really very fast. Montana and I have been listening to the last Harry Potter book on the Ipod all week and we finished it. That's right. No NCIS. I'm surprised too. We watched the first day and one episode the second day and then he broke out the book and was hooked. We finished it about 30 minutes before entering Missoula and he was so excited! We talked about Voldemort and Dumbledore and why Dumbledore felt like he was bad when he was really good. He had some pretty darn good insight. Gotta love that. I felt like I was in a book club discussion in the car. The world's smallest book club.

By the way...he fell asleep. Why is this news?? He hasn't slept at all Folks. Not the entire week. Guess he just wanted to wait for the book to end.