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I read about this application on marko’s blog. It sounded fun so I tried it our with pictures from our Piper’s first birthday which we celebrated at our first Bible Study after our camping trip.  She is so ridiculously cute.

When you geocache, there are some different acheivements people go for.  Such as how many finds you have, or the number of highest difficulty caches.  Another acheivement is “First To Find”.  This means that the instant the cache is public, it’s up for grabs, and whoever gets to it first gets that official title (and often something in reward).

We were wiped out and ready for sleep, and Eric was just checking his e-mail before we got ready for bed.  Up popped a notice that a cache was just posted only 3.5 miles from our apartment.  He said, “we’re going for it!”  I ran and grabbed our headlamps and a pen, while he plugged the coordinates into our gps.  Then we literally ran out the door and to our car!

It said it was a park and grab (meaning you can park your car and simply walk up to it) but it wasn’t quite that simple.  First we turned down the wrong street, then we went the long way behind a row of houses.  We walked .13 miles in shorts and slippers (flip-flops for you mainlanders) through rocks, and black berry bushes.  We got there only 30 seconds ahead of the next couple geocaching, but it was just enough.  Eric found it and we were first!

The couple we met go by the name Bollom and Tularoo, fun huh?  It’s always nice seeing young geocachers, a lot of them are retired with lots of free time (which is awesome too).  Here’s a picture of Eric with our prize.

If any of you reading this are geocachers, the hide was The Great Gazoo Lost His Probe 1.  If you’re not a geocacher, you should be.  Thanks for the hunt Luke505!

Are you ready for millions of pictures?  Okay maybe only twenty.  This is our third annual small group camping trip.  This is also our first time with two little ones!  We went to Ocean City State Park at Ocean Shores.

When we arrived, this dog from the camp site next to ours immediately jumped up for Eric to pet her, and did not want to get down.  He gets attention from all the ladies, I’m serious.

Eric, Heather, and I arrived a few hours before everyone else, so we walked a couple miles along the beach to a geocache.  It was windy.

So windy it was actually hard to walk in!!

This bench is right by the geocache we found.  Cool huh?

You have to walk a long ways through grass to get to and from the beach, I love this picture of Eric.

There was some different flora in that are than I’ve seen in the rest of Washington.  Eric and I spotted this on our geocaching day (we ditched the group while they played a 3 hour game of Settlers)

This picture turned out terribly but I had to put it because we found our first “Cache Across America” cache.  There’s one in each state and they each have a code.  When you find all 50 you use the code to find the final cache in DC.  We were excited to find out we’d be camping so close to one.

This is the beautiful view from where we were geocaching.

Later that second day, our whole group headed to the beach.  That’s my sister Sharon, my sister-in-law Heather, and Aaron with Piper in the background.

I told Emily a few days before the trip that her packing list was her bucket and her shovel.  She remembered! (or more likely Mommy remembered)

Eric found a whip on the beach!  Really it was some kind of sea plant, but it was cool!

Aaron and Piper.  Aaron was way excited to bring his fancy kite, which was really cool.  The best part was when it knocked him and Eric down at the same time!

Piper had a great time at the beach.

Piper and Emily love Eric so much, his name is the first both girls said of people in our group.

You can’t tell in this picture but she had so much fun riding on Eric’s back and was laughing and giggling up a storm.  He’s gonna be a great dad one day.

This is Emily’s experience with a roasted marshmallow, it squishes even better than it tastes!

This was what we made our campfire pizzas on.  Yummy, but lots of work.  Can you see the scream face?

This was right before we left on Sunday.  We’re not ready to be parents yet, but we sure love having friends with kids that we can live vicariously through!

I have a wonderful husband, the other day he told me that the bad thing about riding his bike to work is that it makes it hard for him to bring me flowers!  But Mondays I’m off, so a couple Mondays ago, he drove and came home with these beauties.

If you don’t know why yellow roses are so special to me, read it here!

We have lots more pictures from our anniversary geocaching trip, Middle School camp, High School camp, and more!  But it’s time to do housework.  We also go out of town again Tuesday for the Celebrate Recovery Summit where we’ll hopefully get some great training for Life Hurts God Heals.  Pray for safe travels and that we learn a lot.

So we had these grand plans of doing multiple hikes on mt Rainier everyday of our anniversary trip.  There were two problems with that.  First of all, we’ve had freakishly cold weather so there’s still tons of snow on Rainier and we didn’t want to end up a news story.  Secondly, we were exhausted from the current craziness of our life (hopefully slowing down in September when our internship is over), and needed a lot of just hanging out and relaxing time.

But we did manage to get a 5 or 6 mile hike in one day.  Eric’s done way more hiking than me this summer, doing hikes with some of his youth group guys.  The first couple of miles were tough for me, but once we had lunch and I got used to it, I had so much fun.  Oh yeah, and my knee was starting to really hurt, so Eric prayed for it and it completely stopped hurting!  God is awesome.

Our hike started by longmire, and one of the first things we saw was this little tree growing out of a giant stump.

There was also this cool trunk, I don’t even know how that happens.

We had lunch here at the lookout.  It was beautiful and the sun was warm (it was a cool day).  Some other hikers came along while we were eating (we didn’t see very many people that day which was nice) and pointed out a grouse that had been sneaking toward us.

They thought it might be a turkey, but I looked it up to make sure, it really is a grouse.

We saw a lot of beauty that day.  Thanks God for the great weather.