Current Location: Washington State Fairgrounds, Puyallup, Washington

The astute reader might notice that our current location is no longer Lake Chelan State Park. We’ll explain shortly.

While at Lake Chelan, we enjoyed visiting with some of Cole’s cousins over the weekend and of course, with our grandchildren during the course of the week. We spent a lot of time splashing in the lake, a bit of time shopping downtown (either for supplies or just to shop) and some time just cooling off in Nana and Pa’s trailer (Cole, Elizabeth and the girls are tent camping this week). We’ll round up pictures later, though to be honest, we spent more family time than camera time.

On Thursday evening, there was talk of scattered thunderstorms. Rather than potentially scare the children from further camping trip opportunities, we decided to let the girls sleep in the trailer. Scarlet decided she wanted mommy, so she ended up in the tent. We did get a brief thundershower about 5:30 in the morning. There was a lot more thunder and lightning than there was rain. The lightning, unfortunately, started several new wildfires in the immediate area.

We went into town Friday morning to get some groceries for dinner and could see a pretty good fire burning down the hills towards the other side of town. We also had planned on playing at the local water park, but it was below that fire and had already been told by the sheriff’s office not to open. We ended up back at the state park and splashed in the lake.

When we first got back to the campground, we could see some smoke rising over the hill behind the state park. As the afternoon progressed, the smoke got thicker. Three helicopters were busy getting water from the lake and flying up to the top of the hill to dump it on the spreading flames. By about 4:00, the flames were spreading down the hill on our side, fanned by increasing winds. Shortly thereafter, the park ranger came through the park and told everyone they would have to pack up and leave.

We all packed up in short order and headed on west so that Elizabeth, Cole and the girls could head on home and so that we could head on to the Washington State Fairgrounds campground three days early. The weather got much cooler and wetter as we headed west which hampered travel. We finally arrived at the fairgrounds campground about 9:30 PM. The camp hosts were not around, so we backed into an empty space next to them and just dropped the front trailer jacks. We didn’t hook up water or electric.

Malcolm heard the camp hosts come in a little while later and let them know what we were doing. They said they’d catch up with us in the morning. This morning Malcolm walked over and paid for our extra three days. He and the camp host walked over to look at two different sites. Malcolm picked the one further away from the main road. We pulled in our slides, pulled up the jacks and headed over there to set up. Elizabeth stopped by McDonalds and brought us all breakfast.

We headed out at 11:00 and met the family for lunch at Trackside Pizza, one of the girls’ favorites. We traded off car seats afterwards and entertained the girls all afternoon. Elizabeth and Cole attended a memorial service for a family member and took care of some child-free errands. We went over to their house this evening and had dinner and visited until we were tired (and it was the girls’ bedtime).