I know, I know.  You thought I forgot didn’t you?  Well, here’s the last little bit of our trip.  I’ll warn you, it is heavy on the pictures.  Saturday was our big mountain outing.    Our first stop was the creation museum:

We were all very excited to start  this leg of our trip.  And it wasn’t raining!

The museum was a lot of fun.  The front section had a number of hands on stations and lots of posters and pictures explaining what happened before, during, and after the eruption.

Given Oliver’s love for rocks this was, by far, his favorite corner.

We were fortunate to visit on a day when the operator, Lloyd, was doing his presentation.  Here he was showing the kids different stones including pumice.  They had to pick ones they thought they could float.  The stone Zoe picked was not pumice and she is telling everyone it sunk.

This A-frame house was build shortly before the eruption and was flooded by the mud flows.  The owners tried to dig it out but soon found that the waters were flooding.  It has been saved as an example of the eruption’s effects.

From there we worked our way up the mountain a little more before stopping for lunch at a place with playground and good views.  I can’t remember the name but it was something the forestry people created.  Samantha and I headed inside to check out their displays.  It was a lot of fun and much bigger than I expected.   Last year when we came it was the end of summer and everything was dry and brown.  It was a much bigger impact of the devastation the eruption had.  This time, being the start of spring, things were green and full of life.

The final stop was the Johnston Ridge Observatory.  And snow at the top.

Clouds prevented us from really seeing the mountain.

The family picture attempt with tired kids.

We took a different path back to the car.  Just a tad more snow.

We ended the day with bike riding in jammies and a campfire.

Oh, and the last battle of Ticket to Ride between these two.

This was the last picture I took on the trip.  Sunday we headed to a church about 20 minutes south that Greg had looked up online.  After that we hit Applebee’s for lunch then picked up the rest of the crew back at camp and headed to visit some dear friends of ours in the Portland area.  Greg really wanted to show them the bus and he asked if we could drive it down.  I don’t know what they were expecting but we could tell by their reaction when we pulled up they weren’t expecting The Bus.  It was a great visit and a great end to our trip.