A highlight...forgot to post

Here's a couple photos I forgot to add to the last post. This was a highlight for all of us as we had never gone whitewater rafting before. Here we are on the Yellowstone River.

To Iowa and back...

It's been very quiet on the blog front lately... The summer has just flown by - lots of friends & family have visited while our family continued to work very hard during the day. We knew that the end of summer would bring our turn to go on vacation. Our plan was to bring Lorelle to Iowa where she'd begin her college studies at Dordt. We left late Tuesday evening after a full days work. We figured the long drive had to be conquered one way or another.... so we drove 13 hours to Billings, Montana. We found a campsite close to Yellowstone Park and thoroughly enjoyed our time there. We sat and waited for Old Faithful to be faithful and spent an afternoon white water rafting on the Yellowstone River. After 3 days we travelled on (7 hours) to the Mt. Rushmore area. We camped there (sometimes a Kabin at KOA), enjoyed the tours and presentations about Mt. Rushmoor as well as drove through Custer National Park and the Black Hills area and saw amazing wildlife and geological wonders. You can't but agree that God is the amazing creator of all things - at times it just took our breath away. We carried on with our travels only to stop at the Badlands area within a hour of getting on the road. After that, we drove to Sioux Falls, SD where we spent two evenings just resting - playing games, a little shopping, etc. We headed into the wide open country of Iowa after that. We helped Lorelle settle into her dorm - talked with the other girls that had arrived from our area and introduced ourselves to the young lady from Nebraska who would make number 4. The following day we had to face the sad goodbye's - and the looooong trip ahead of us to get back home. We were enriched with the preaching at the Belgrade, MT URC and arrived home Monday morning early. Here is just a small sample of the many photos we took. It's hard to capture the amazing sites we saw - but I think you get the picture.

Our trip to San Juan Island

Henry & I were able to get away for an overnight trip to San Juan Island. The weather was beautiful - somewhat cooler at times than the mainland - but the weekend really was perfect. We had a gift certificate to use at Anthony's - one of our favorite restaurants and then we went on to Anacortes. We stayed in a tiny little hotel room - Captain's Cabin - and in the morning took the ferry to Friday Harbor. We rented mopeds to tour the island. We spent time watching numerous orcas playing in the water - they put on quite the show!! By 5:00 we had toured the entire island, stopping whenever we liked what we saw. When we arrived home we had enough time to unpack & spend a bit of time preparing for my cousin's family from Ontario who will be using our driveway as a camping "pad" for a few days. Lots of summer fun!