Tacomawa: Tacoma Summer Events + Mt. Ranier WA

When Ginger arrived home from Montana, she found a surprise...

 After our long search for a Mini Cooper last year, Stephen knew exactly what parameters we wanted for a car. It's a 2007 with 56k miles, and a better deal than any of the cars we saw in New Jersey. (We are going to tone down the checkerboard design sometime.) It's only had one owner, and has all our favorite special features (heated seats, sun roof, audio jack, manual drive.) Stephen worked hard to find a car bow!

Stephen took Ginger to a high school parking lot to practice driving stick. (A teen and his dad showed up for the same reason while we were there.) She's learning.

Tacoma has had several fun summer events, like the Taste of Tacoma fair and Fourth of July fireworks show at Puget Sound.

 

For InterVarsity, Ginger visited Tacoma Community College several times to meet students during summer classes and find out how to start a club there. Correy, Sadie and Zach came to a Bible study (left) and Ginger's supervisor Tim is helping her learn about planting. 

 

She's still making cakes at Albertsons. Two favorites are drawing a naval destroyer, and an Under the Sea cake.

We enjoying our back yard! The summer weather is wonderful for grilling and playing with Clementine.

  

Our friends Jason and Julie have returned to WA after several years working on the RI project. Jason is on a different job site than Stephen now, but they live nearby in Puyallup.

Mt. Ranier

Our biggest summer adventure has been our camping trip to a state park near Mt. Ranier.

One of Stephen's coworkers advised us to visit his favorite hiking trail without sharing all the details. We were a little overwhelmed by the 3 mile trail (6 total), 3,000 foot elevation change, about 4 hours going up and 2 hours going down, ranked as a "very difficult" trail. None of this information was posted on the board at the Trailhead. But we made it!

 Google Earth capture after Stephen figured out the trail.

Hiking up had beautiful views facing south, with many mountains and meadows. Then at the top of the ridge, we could see north to Mt. Rainer (very light blue in this image)- a sight that made the climb worthwhile.

Clementine the happy camper.