Travels with Kenny

Wednesday August 11, 2010, Yakima, Wash.

Today was bittersweet for me. One of our very best friends, Artie, was buried today and we were
not able to attend. I am very grateful we were able to visit them in May, but so sad that I was not able to be there for my dear friend Kathryn. I am happy that our children and daughter in law made the trip to NY for the funeral and I will forever be grateful . Mount Rainer showed its beautiful face today as we drove to the park and that was for Artie.

We left our hotel for Mt. Rainier in sunshine hoping when we got to the mountain it, too, would be in sunshine, and on the way up the mountains the clouds cleared away, and Mt. Rainier showed itself in brilliant sunshine. It's really something to see--snow, glaciers, numerous snow-melt waterfalls, and, looking like tiny specks, climbers on the glaciers. Pretty neat. Serry and I took a 2.5 mile hike up the mountain to the snow line. I'm still out of breath, but Serry could have jogged up. The lower reaches of the mountain are covered with meadows covered with wildflowers. The whole scene is just beautiful. Later in the afternoon we took a hike at a lower altitude through a dark, moss-covered forest. Also beautiful, though very different from the morning hike. Did I mention we saw lots of marmots at the higher elevations? They look kind of like groundhogs, only smaller.

We're now in Yakima, which I guess is a high-desert area--hot and dusty, no more towering evergreens. It looks like there are a number of vegetable-processing factories here. Not really a tourist destination, as far as we can tell.

Our next "scheduled" destination is Yellowstone, but we're concerned about getting there on the weekend, when the crowds will probably be awful, so we may have to go somewhere else first. We could always do a couple of weeks of laundry; that would kill some time. And we could wash and vacuum out the car. That would kill a week right there.