Well, here we are – Washington – the last state of our trip – we made it! Whew! And we still like each other 😜

The plan was to leave Portland and travel the 60 to 90 minute trip to Johnson Observatory, and then travel to Mount Ranier (2 hours away) and then on to Seattle. But… The Washington DOT had other plans… They were doing the strangest most inefficient road work on the ONE road that leads to the top of Mount St. Helens. So that 90 minute trip took 3 hours… So, one a positive note we had lots of opportunities to take great pictures

We stopped at the original Visitor’s Center to look around but I had read reviews that this was really dated and there is a charge for admission.  So we took a great picture, and headed to the Forrest Learning Center.

The Forrest Learning Center is sponsored by Weyerhaeuser, and is FREE.  It was really interesting and hands-on for kids. Boys loved the “Discovery Lab” where they could touch everything.

We loved that they focused on animals and how the eruption effected them

Leo liked the wearable Eagle Talon and showing daddy the difference in people vision vs eagle vision (their vision is so much more powerful like a zoom lens)

Michael and I liked the brown bear 😮 (we learned almost 600 brown bears were killed in the blast!🐻🐻🐻)

And everyone liked he helicopter model so you could pretend to be a helicopter pilot rescuing people during the ash fallout!

And then… We found the playground! Thank goodness because we hadn’t practiced our ninja warrior skills in about 5 minutes so…

We headed further up the mountain to the Johnson Observatory – named after a geologist who was camped here near the top at the time of the eruption. His last words were “Vancover, Vancover, this is it!” They never found anything from him or his camp.

Hard to imagine that an entire side of the mountain just blew off!

As we headed down the mountain to Mount Ranier, we had to deal with same traffic issues.  We finally headed toward Mt Ranier and got on highway 505 at 4! I got a little worried that since it’s a National Park , they may close at 5. The website said they didn’t BUT they did note that they were doing construction on the road to Mount Ranier… So basically we would be in the same boat just 4 hours from now. So we decided to skip Mount Ranier for now.

Instead, we decided to eat – what a surprise! Since lunch was a few peanut butter crackers, we had an “early bird dinner” at Ribeye Ramblin’ Jacks in Chehalis, Washinton 😀.  Think local restaurant meets Western Sizzler meets Shoneys with really good food. And the BIGGEST desserts ever! Here is their 1 pound cinnamon roll:

It was hokey and delicious! Perfect for us:

(Plus who doesn’t secretly want to eat in a restaurant with a giant cow on top?!?!)

We arrived in Seattle and watched a little of the Olympics and movies while having milk and our sweet desserts

Boys finished off the night with some swimming and hot tub time

Tomorrow we have a “Savory Seattle Tour” of Pikes Market and lunch inside the Space Needle (the restaurant rotates!) cannot believe we only have 2 more days!!!