Snowball Fight!!

Good morning from Welches, Oregon! We are at the base of Mount Hood in a beautiful 2-level time share townhouse. I would have blogged last night but I was having trouble with the site. Yesterday we started the day at Mt. Rainier. I am going to run out of words to describe the amazing views. John kept breaking into America the Beautiful (ala Clark Griswold of the Vacation movies).  We started deep in a forest and climbed up the mountain. The excitement started to mount when we stopped at an amazing mountain lake that still had snow surrounding it.  We had a good time with a few snowballs and the kids made mini-snowmen.
We continued up the mountain. We hiked on a trail to a suspension bridge over a river. It bounced as you walked and the sign recommended 1 person on the bridge at a time. Jimmy and Peter are small so they went together. It was like walking on those barrels on Tom Sawyer island at Disney. As we climbed further up the mountain, the snow at the top was melting so there were a lot of babbling brooks and waterfalls. When we got to the visitor center, there was snow everywhere! Everyone really enjoyed sliding around and snowball fighting.  We spent a good part of the day at the mountain, but had to move on to get to Mount St. Helens before the visitor center closed.  I just knew that Mt. St. Helens was a volcano, I did not know what to expect. As we drove up, you could see that half the mountain was missing a side. You could see right into the lava dome. We were still miles away and we kept passing forests that had signs that said, "planted in 1982" or some year during the early 80s. We have this feature in our car that tells us how many miles of gas we have left. According to that, we were fine to get up the mountain and back to the interstate. Yeah, um, we have learned that as you drive up a mountain, those miles peel away quickly. It was a little intense because as we pulled into the visitor's center, the gas light went on. However, the visitor's center was almost closing so we decided to enjoy it while we were there. We watched an awesome movie that explained the landslides and the eruption and could see the destruction left behind. Even on neighboring mountains, you could see all the dead trees lying on the ground. So we took in the view of the devastation and coasted back down the mountain, getting to a gas station of fumes.  We had dinner at a picturesque restaurant on a river. We had to eat there because the sign out front advertised elk burgers. Doesn't sound to good to me either, but John liked his. After dinner, we headed south to Oregon. We drove along the banks of the Columbia River and were near the site that DB Cooper's money was found, that was pretty cool.  Here we are. Today we are going up Mt. Hood. Tonight we will be staying in the same place. We'll keep you posted.