Steel trees and Frozen Volcanoes

In Seattle we cruised around on our bikes and almost got pinched by the cops for not wearing helmets, oops. Checked out the troll under the bridge, gasworks park, Olympic sculpture park, Pikes place public market, the Space Needle from afar ($15 a piece to ride an elevator?! no thanks.) and the original Starbucks. It was such a hot day, there were so many sailboats on the water and picnickers in the parks. We stayed with Michael's friends Ari and Pamela, super neat people with two adorably boisterous kids and their flat faced kitte' in Snoqualmie. It was really nice to stay with a young family.

We're still on our free camping and couch surfing streak. Since we got on the road near the end of July we've paid for three camp sites (grand canyon back country, a night in Utah and Crater Lake) and one hostel (during a rain storm in Moab, Utah). We've been really lucky to meet such neat people couch surfing. Elizabeth and Brandon in Bend got us thinking more about working for ourselves. Owen and Terra in Portland inspired us to start home brew once we have a home and are settled. Pamela and Ari gave us a lot of neat suggestions on stuff to check out and made us consider wine tasting to supplement the brews and let us play with secret unreleased video game technology.

After two nights in Snoqualmie we got back on the road and headed to Mount Rainier on a drizzly day. Got to walk around the flower meadows in the fog, which seemed to make the purples, pinks and greens really pop. We headed up to see a glacier up close, but couldn't make it out in the fog, all wasn't lost though--we saw plenty of chubby little marmots and had a snowball fight.

We're cruising through Idaho, again, on our way to Glacier National Park.