Location: Washington State Fair Campground, Puyallup, Washington

Dates: Aug. 20 to 25, 2017

On Monday, Elizabeth and the girls came over to experience the solar eclipse with us. Though we weren’t in the path of totality, we did get 94% coverage. That meant that it got fairly dark, like just at sunset type of dark.

We did do some interesting experiments when not viewing the eclipse through the two pairs of eclipse viewing glasses we had. One was to see how the eclipse affected the bright areas in the shadow of a nearby tree, making a bunch of semi-circles.

We also showed the girls how you could view the eclipse on a solid surface by putting a small hole in a piece of cardboard and focusing the resulting image on a piece of paper.

Once it was done, life went back to normal with Malcolm working for a while and Val visiting with Elizabeth and the girls. We had dinner at their house later in the day.

Tuesday was generally a stay inside day. Malcolm worked and Val worked on some sewing projects. We went over to Elizabeth’s house for dinner and came back home afterwards. Right after we left, Cole called Malcolm to let him know that the wheels for the trailer had arrived.

When Malcolm contacted the wheel company about the cracked wheel, he got them to send him a replacement wheel for the cracked rim, and two more to complete the set of four on the trailer (we already had one replaced last fall).

On Wednesday, Malcolm spent most of the day working on getting wheels replaced on the trailer. We drove up to Elizabeth’s in the morning to pick up the wheels and drop Val off to work on some sewing with Elizabeth. Malcolm took the new wheels and the three tires and wheels from the trailer to the tire store to drop them all off.

Malcolm picked up the wheels and tires a couple hours later, then went up to pick Val up from Elizabeth’s house since Elizabeth and the girls were going to visit some friends. Malcolm got everything mounted back on the trailer and the spare put back into place.

Later in the afternoon, we ran the old wheels over to a recycling place and got $36 for them, offsetting some of the cost of mounting and balancing the tires on the new rims. Afterwards, we headed on back to the trailer.

Cole and Elizabeth dropped the girls off around dinner time and headed to have dinner with family. The girls spent the night with us in the trailer. Nana and the girls had a slumber party in the living room and Pa got the bed to himself (a change from the usual overnight arrangements when the girls stay over).

Elizabeth came by on Thursday with her babysitting children and we all had cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Afterwards, Elizabeth left with all the children to run a couple errands, taking Val along with her. She dropped Val off later on. Malcolm stayed in the trailer and worked. We went up to their house for dinner.

After dinner, Elizabeth and Cole took Violet out to buy back-to-school supplies (she’s in first grade this year). We talked Scarlet into going to the grocery store with us by bribing her with a stop for ice cream.

We dropped her off at home and headed back to the trailer after Elizabeth, Cole and Violet returned.

On Friday, it was moving day. Time to leave the fairgrounds as the fair starts in a week and they need the campground for vendors and others involved with the fair. We were only moving 24 miles up the road to Gig Harbor, so we delayed leaving until nearly noon.

Val took some time to pick up Violet and take her to the store to buy a birthday present for Scarlet since they were having Scarlet’s birthday party (a couple weeks early) at Elizabeth’s house. Val got back around 11 am and Malcolm called ahead to the next campground to verify that our site would be available. It was, so we finished hitching up and headed on up the road to our next stop in nearby Gig Harbor.