Cowboy Zebra

Our road is lined with huge blackberry canes and they have these huge berries. They have just started to turn black in the last week, and they are loaded. There are still thousands of green berries, so we'll have berries for quite a while! They boys remind me of little bear cubs filling up on berries. We've been enoying cobblers, smoothies, and just plain berries!

After parking we all talked a bit, replaced belt tensioners(not me), ate, and took pictures of Mount St Helens. It was really barren in that area, almost like there had been an explosion.

It's cool to see this many neat cars together.

This is an overflow parking lot below one of the visitor center/restaurant/gift shop/glass blowing shops things. It was right next to a helicopter sightseeing company. After some discussion a plan was hatched where the car club would buy a few tickets on the helicopter and the helicopter would follow us in our cars to let the people on board take some video for an upcoming Mount St Helens run video. I'll post the video when I see it. It was just like being in the movies, only it was real and there are more bugs than you'd think there should be around a volcano.

Today Stephanie was gracious enough to let me attend my first car club driving event down to Mount St. Helens. At the previous Mopar car show I met several of the guys from lxforums.com, a large LX enthusiast site. The LX platform is shared between 300s, Magnums, and Chargers. They have a well developed club that always shows up in force at car shows. It's pretty impressive seeing 50+ cars show up all at once, and it's even more impressive when they sound as good as these guys do. So, the lxforum allowed the Viper club to tag along. Several Viper guys are also LXforum members so it's a good fit. There were convoys starting in both Canada and Oregon. I caught up with the North to South convoy as it passed through Tacoma. I took this picture as I let them pass so I could pull in with my Viper guys. It was 100 miles down to exit 49 where we all met and had a quick little car show before heading the 50 miles East to Mount St. Helens.

Elliott enjoys going into "big" church with us for the first half while Ian is also there. He loves to sing and sometimes does so rather loudly and in made up syllables. Today after we finished singing the first song and there is that silence between the songs, Elliott shouts out, "Yay!" and laughs and claps his hands. Of course it was loud enough for the whole church to hear and there were numerous chuckles and heads turning. If only we all were so ecstatic to praise God!
Afterwards we stopped by Target and on coming out there was a rather large woman coming in. "Mommy," Ian asked, "Why is that woman waddling a little bit?" Fortunately I don't think he could have been heard.

Yesterday was hot (for here) so we took a picnic to a nearby state park. The boys enjoyed picking up sand dollars and crabs and wading in the water.