Skamania Day 3 & 4 - A weekend visit from our Seattle freinds!

Since I am so far behind on blogging, I am still talking about our Oregon/Washington trip, in case you're confused.  By Saturday, which was 5 days into our trip, we were in desparate need of some clean laundry, and since I was not going to pay $3.50 per shirt and $2.00 for each pair of socks to be washed at the hotel, I headed over to the local laundromat while Russ took the boys swimming.  At first I thought, "Oh, this will be kind of nice.  I will put the laundry in and then just sit and relax, read my book, etc."  Little did I know that would be cleaning out gross washing machines, because I put my money in it and then looked inside.  And that I would be going back and forth to the nearby grocery store because I ran out of change when the machine stole my money (only it didn't really steal my money, I am just commercial laundromat dryer inept).  Or that I would have to go back to the store because there was NO bathroom at the tiny little laundromat. Ugh.  So I had about 15 minutes of down time, in which I cleaned out my purse.  Yippee (w/ sarcasm).

But onto the more exciting part.  Some friends of ours drove about 4 hours down from Seattle just to see us!  They arrived right around lunch time, so we headed over to this place called The Crazy Pepper.  We had seen it the night before and decided we should eat there because we really liked the name.  And it actually turned out to be quite good.  Best part: the umbrellas that came in the drinks (not sure how Mexican that is, but whatever.)

After that, the big boys took the little boys while my friend, Jen, and I did a little shopping around Hood River.  It's your typical little tourist town, lots of boutiques and random shops.  It was fun.  I didn't spend that much money, because everything was either too expensive or too weird.  I think if I didn't live in Utah, I could pull it off, but . . . you know.  Anyway, so that night Jen and I stayed with the boys while Russ and Rahul went out and had some man time.  It's good for them to get away too. :)

Jen and Rahul crashed in our room with us, so the boys had a little floor slumber party, complete with glow sticks.  They were so cute once they were asleep, I couldn't resist.

The next day we hiked Beacon Rock.  It's famous apparently, and so of course, we had to see it.  I was never in a place to actually get a picture of it from any decent distance, so here's a picture I stole from the internet:

And here's what the hike looked like:

But the kids were serious troopers and did awesome!

And the view from the top wasn't too bad either.

And we all made it back to the bottom...

 

Since we had had a super late breakfast, we skipped lunch and headed back to the hotel for a bike ride.  The hotel has free adult bikes, so we had brought Corbin's bike and the bike trailer (for Russ' workout).  It was gorgeous!  That is until we had to ride back UP to the hotel.  It was fun anyway. 

 

We rode into town and got ice cream and homemade donuts.  Unfortunately the same guy was working as when we had been there the night before.  hehe.  Yeah, we're addicts, but it's vacation, right?

(Don't worry, you are now half way done with hearing about this vacation.)