There are occasionally signs that cause me to chuckle. This was one of them. The top sign was the name of the road: “Summit Road”. We were driving north on Highway 101 near Tillamook, Oregon (on the coast). To the right was a small set of hills, the tops of which would have been about 700 feet above sea level.

Just below it says: “No Outlet”. You can go up, but the only way out is to come back down this road.

Finally, the blue/white signs in the middle say that in case one needs to evacuate because of a tsunami, go up the “no outlet” “Summit Road” and then pray that there will be a road to come back down. I thought the sign combination was much funnier than my traveling companion thought….

I’ve put three sets of pictures in the Photo Album. One has some miscellaneous pictures from around Seattle, another has some pictures from a couple of days of sightseeing around Seattle and visiting with family, and the last has some pictures from our whale-watching cruise. Enjoy!

Nina just came back from the laundry so we’ve now clean stuff for the rest of the trip. A little earlier we trimmed a day off our time here in this campground. Nothing against the RV Beach Resort in Cannon Beach, Oregon! It’s just that the forecast is for rain the rest of the week. That’s a bit too much rain for us and we’re headed inland where there will be much less rain. We had a pretty good weather week last week and it was too much to ask for this week to be equally as good.

I’m starting to feel a bit better (as long as I keep taking the drugs every three hours). Hopefully this cold will be brief and stay up top. Today amidst all of the raindrops, we drove north to Astoria, across a classic bridge into Washington, and up along the seashore. I should rather say amidst the torrents of rain. We stopped at Desperation Point State Park where I walked out to one of the lighthouses to try and get a picture. The wind must have been blowing 50 mph or better with rain just pelting down. I did take a few pictures, but the weather didn’t not help. I was quite soaked when I got back to the car. We had lunch at a restaurant in downtown Astoria where we both had a bowl of delightful clam chowder. Now that the laundry is done, it’s only about 6:30 p.m. at night, and we’ll need to figure out what else to do with the evening. There must be something around worth doing!

We have arrived to our asphalt campground in Bellevue, Washington. The campground is definitely an asphalt jungle! No grass, but there are a few trees and bushes. It’s about fifteen minutes from Jared’s house and therefore very convenient.  It is also directly across the freeway from the Seattle Temple!  We’ll do a session there probably on Saturday morning. We drove past it this evening and it is a very beautiful building.

We decided to go to Mt. Rainier National Park on our way to Seattle today. That turned out to be a mistake. We drove to Yakima and then turned inland to drive to the park. A part of the road was closed and we were sent on a very, very long detour to go around where the road construction crews were blasting a hillside. It took about an hour to go around  large (and almost empty) reservoir and back to the main road. It was a twisty, narrow, windy road! When we finally got to the southeast entrance to the park, we found that all the roads in the park were closed. We drove all that way for nothing. That was quite disappointing. Despite that, we got to the campground at about 5 p.m.

We picked Jared and Arlene up for dinne and had a wonderful visit with them. We’re now back at the RV winding down for the night. We’ll pick them up at about 8 in the morning for our whale-watching-cruise-and-adventure. That should be a lot of fun.

We’re back at the RV from the Columbia River Temple. We struggled out of bed about 5:30 a.m. PDT this morning and were actually out of the RV driving to the temple at 6:24 a.m. this morning. It was about a ten minute drive from the campground to the temple. I was pleasantly surprised at how many people were there. We had thirteen sisters and ten brothers in the session meaning there were seventeen empty seats. The temple is small but very beautiful. The Celestial Room is gorgeous! We had a delightful session and the time was well worth it. In a few minutes we’ll unhook the utilities, hook up the car, and drive away. We think we’ll drive through the Mt. Rainier National Park on our way to Seattle.

For the past year one of the “hot” topics on the Internet has been Twitter.  I finally set up my account the other day. Apparently this setup allows one to send little “tweets” either as text messages or through the web browser or such to your Twitter account. Then anyone subscribed to this feed will receive those little “tweets” however they choose, such as on their cell phones or computer screens, or such. So, who has a Twitter account? It’d be interesting to see whether or not this has any value or usefulness.

Nina has an amazing amount of trouble with her Windows laptop, particularly trying to connect to wireless access points. My Macbook simple connects. No hassle, no fuss or bother. It finds the strongest, open signal and just connects. If there are no open access points, but secured access points are available, it’ll ask which one I want to connect to and lets me put in the key and it connects. This sure seems to be something that Dell needs to get figured out on their laptops. One of these days Nina will be ready for a new notebook computer. I think the next one will be a Mac based on our experience while traveling for the past couple of months.  Time to get moving!