Leavenworth Fourth

I'm always in favor of a day off work, add having fun going somewhere with the family to that and I am most definitely all in.

For the long 4th of July weekend we were able to camp with the Urvina (Valerie's side) of the family this year in Leavenworth, WA. We had stayed at the KOA campground there a couple of years ago, that time in cabins and had a very nice time so we decided we would try that same campground again.

Hey, if they are konfident enough to spell campground with a "K", it has to be fun. This time we decided to all stay in tents in adjacent campsites.

Leavenworth is kind of a cool place. Several years ago they decided to theme the whole town after an German villiage which successfully sucked in the tourist in droves. Having served a mission in Germany, the differences are more apparent to me. If they could add some drunks yell curses at me in German, I would be a lot more convinced of the authenticity.

It is unbelievable for some reason how difficult it is for us to get ready camping. It seems like it takes days to dig our gear out of the garage, make lists of things that need bought and brought and to seemingly pack all of our worldly possessions into the van to simply get out the door. Combine that with what has thus far seemed to be an insanely busy summer schedule and it was a real chore to simply get ourselves on the way.

Valerie met and picked me up straight from my office on Thursday afternoon hoping that we could get a jump on the traffic heading out of town over Snoqualmie pass and before we knew it we were on the road.

Normally I LOVE road trips, I don't know why but I think it is just exciting to have the whole family plus dog in the car going somewhere. This time though, for several days prior to departure, Ben had been sick in the worse possible "both-ends" kind of way.

We had contemplated cancelling the trip for ourselves but in the day or so prior he seemed to be on the up-tick. Still though, we had to stop a couple of times on the way up for to change blowouts. I'm not referring to tires.

The spending time together as a family part of the trip was really a lot of fun. It is always good to have the whole gang together to talk, play with cousins, rent pedal cars etc.

Unfortunately, our little unit of the family did seem to have the rotating wave of illness continue as we were there. One night Sarah became quite sick and threw-up with her head only out of the tent, oh and once with her head in. Yikes. That ended up accounting for two towels that didn't make the trip home.

Don't get me wrong, the whole trip wasn't misery and illness. It was way more fun than not.

We did get to do some sight-seeing in town, I of course managed to get a fair dose of geocaching in with some of my favorite cache partners and we all really enjoyed Kelsi Button's 7th birthday party.

For the fireworks on the 4th, we had to head about 20 miles east of the mountains to Wenatchee to watch the show over the Columbia River there. Fireworks are strictly banned in Leavenworth itself which is very understandable considering that the city was very nearly annyalated by forest fires in 1994 and the hills surrounding are still very prone to fire.

On Sunday morning we headed back home and by that time I myself had a fever of about 117 degrees. Needless to say, we were very happy to be home again.

We instantly started planning to go on a family trip again next year.