Wordless Wednesday

Hangin' with the Deli-Subs

The Deli-Kids love to go geocaching so, of course, we went.  I noticed there was a Darth Vader themed cache nearby so I took my fellow Star Wars geeks to go find it.  We were very impressed with the find.  You had to press a button in Darth's mouth to make a nearby ping pong ball shoot up, then use the lock combination written on the ball to open the cache.  Very cool!  We liked it so much, we made a point of finding several others hidden by the same guy.  We were not disappointed.  Cacher friends, next time you're in the northwest, look for goblindust caches.  He's right up there with himilecyclist in the creative hides department.  Non-cacher friends, stop rolling your eyes!  You just don't get it yet.  Mom Bread even liked them.  :)

We didn't find the cache here but we found a super-cool climbing tree.  I had to drag the boys away, even after telling them about the pizza that was waiting for them.  That's a seriously great tree.  When we got back in the car, Baloney emphatically stated, "I'm so uncomfortable!  It has to be at least 70 degrees in this car!" Yeah, it's freezing here.

I wanted to go for a hike so Mom Bread suggested going to the Dungeness Spit.  Here we are at the trailhead. 

Mom Bread and the girls walked partway with us, then hung out at the beach while Pickle, Baloney and I walked and walked and walked and walked.

We finally made it to the lighthouse.

We ate some lunch and Pickle caught a few frogs.

 

Then we took a tour, talked to the lighthouse keepers . . . members or the American Lighthouse Association who were spending a week there as volunteers because GPS has made lighthouses just about obsolete so they don't have professional keepers anymore,

and headed back.

 Pickle thought it was the greatest thing ever that the tide was coming in so the waves came up to his neck.

The next day, I dragged Mom Bread to Seattle to the mecca of geocaching, Groundspeak headquarters.  It was fun to see "the lily pad" and be the first to sign the latest log in the office.  There were people there who had come all the way from Texas and even Austria.

Groundspeak is in the Fremont area of Seattle, which has to be way up on the list of places with the highest number of street art specimens per capita.

Notice the top right. . . Noogie, top of head.  Love it!

I've been hearing for years about the favorite outing spot at Point No Point.  (So named because it is not a very large point of land.  I had to look that up.)  Pickle decided it was a perfect spot for his birthday party.  This is the treasure hunt that Cheese put together for them. 

 The priority at this party was to play, play, play.  Those boys did it right. They were wet, sandy, tired and happy!

This was the trash can (next to the recycle bin) in the area where we had the party . . . The words are too small to read, but it says Solar Compactor.  Welcome to the great northwest!

New Mexico

This was my first visit to New Mexico.  I had to add it to my "Places to Visit" list after hearing Vicki talk about it with such fondness.  We went to Santa Fe and Albuquerque on this trip. . . Santa Fe was my favorite part.  It's quite a charming town.  

 

Our first stop was the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.  Silly me, I expected there to be a lot of her works there. . . There were only a few, along with a bunch of other stuff from this exhibit.  

After the museum, we headed out to explore the town.  Joan thoroughly explored the shopping possibilities while I checked out the local geocaches.  Linda went for the well-rounded approach and did a little of both.  Later, we met up to see the San Miguel Chapel . . . the oldest still-used church in the U.S.  It was built around 1610.

 The chaplain was giving a tour to a group of soldiers while we were there.

Down the street was a building that is supposed to be the oldest house in the U.S.  I think the folks in Mesa Verde would disagree since they built theirs about 800 years earlier.

We also visited the nearby Loretto Chapel.  The story there says that when the monks moved out and the nuns moved in, they didn't want to use a ladder to get to the second floor but there wasn't enough room to build a staircase.  They prayed for a solution and were visited by a carpenter who built this miracle staircase for them with no nails or other supports then disappeared.  They think it was St. Joseph.

The last stop was Albuquerque where we rode the world's longest tram (2.7 miles) to Sandia Peak and took in some great views.