This is the visit portion of our Summer Vacation.  Something that I usually don't do all that well at.  But....

June 8

Lolli's Mom's house.  Shoreline, North Seattle.

Lolli gets on the phone and starts planning all the visiting she is going to do with her relatives plus planning trips with her mom to buy shoes, visit the doctor, trips to Value Village and the Salvation Army.  I talk her and her mom into letting me borrow the keys to the cabin at Elger Bay on Camano Island.  I do a quick overnight visit to my Brother and Sister-in-law and then beat feet for the cabin.  E-Ha!

I know the Volkswagen camping group, known as the WetWesties, are holed up at Camano Island State Park this weekend and swing by for a look.  I see various ingenious ways of hanging up tarps!

Here are two of about eight vehicles.  Great bunch of folks but I wimp out and head for the cabin, down on the bay.

I stay at the cabin eleven days straight!  What I call... Perfect!

Tide out                                               Tide in

Various relatives come up on weekends to enjoy the cabin but during the week I have the place to myself.  I scrape and caulk and repaint the windows for something to do plus take a daily swim in the bay and a walk up the hill to the store and back.  Read my books.

Of course there were mussels and crab.

The second week I am invited to go flying with my son Jeff on a Tuesday evening.  He is scheduled for a night flight with an instructor along.

"The back seat of the Piper Warrior is available if you want to go".

"  Heck Ya!"

We leave the Auburn Airport at 8:00 in the evening and fly to Friday Harbor.

I sit in the back and keep my mouth shut and watch our route progress on my laptop screen using the DeLorme Topo software with my Garmin GPS plugged in!  The photo on the left is my laptop screen.  The green line going from the lower right diagonally up towards the upper left is our actual route.  We have just flown over the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station!  The photo on the right is Friday Harbor.

  We land, park, and walk into town for sandwiches.  Then back to the plane and, since it is finally totally dark the night portion of Jeff's VFR training can commence.  Jeff flew us to Bellingham, did four stop and goes, then returned us to Auburn.  We got in at 12:30 AM!  An excellent trip!

Lolli got in a lot of quality time with her mom and visits with her family.  I visited my brother and sister-in-law one more time and then both Lolli and I went to the Puyallup area to see my daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren.  We had dinner and watched "Finding Nemo" with the kids, spent the night in the Vanagon on the street in front of their house.  In the morning my son Ross and wife Kerry invited us all over to their house for breakfast and a grandbaby photo shoot.

Here we have, left to right, Taylor, Caleb and Kian.  Grandson Lane had other important things to do and couldn't be part of this photo op.

Ross mentioned that there is an all electric Fly-In at the RAMS flying field so off we go to that.  There is a good turnout of club members and a great variety of electric powered planes.

At 1:30 PM we said our final good-byes.