Of course now that we moved away from the Seattle area what does the family want to do for vacation, go back of course! This wasn't such a bad thing because summer time in Washington can be breathtakingly beautiful. While we lived there, we usually went down to California and Arizona during the summer time. This of course is crazy since it's much cooler up North, but we have seldom been known to do things in any conventional kind of way.
We looked at our driving routes to get there and one thing kept coming up. With the cost of gas going up and up it was going to get real expensive just to get up there and back. I've been saving frequent flyer miles since I started working up there in '04 with the thought of taking Leslie to Hawaii. At the rate we are going I figured we might never go and so I looked into how many flier miles it would take to get us up there. It tuned out I had enough for everyone and so for the first time, the entire family would take a trip on a plane. Visions of life insurance and wills briefly crossed my mind, but I figured if anything happened, we were all on the plane except JJ and he would be fine! With my rationalization session complete, we were off to Seattle.
Bringing all the kids along in an airport was a first for us. At first we moved along like a small mob, but they were too hard to keep track of that way! Finally I made them all follow me in a single line. They looked like a line of ducklings and so I had to quack and tell them to follow along. The girls were amused, but the boys weren't.
The flight up was uneventful and we got a great view of Mt. Rainier on the way in. We went and picked up our rental van and spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to get all our luggage loaded into it and still have room for all the kids! Strike one for hotwire and it's description of the van. We managed to get the back end of the van closed and headed out from the airport. Now that we were moving we needed to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to go first! Does anybody else make out plans for what you're going to do on vacation? Sigh... 
We decided that we'd go to the beach and looked up the location for Dash Point State Park. We found it without too much trouble and we were thrilled with the views. Did I mention that it was sunny? Four years of living there and we finally had some sunny weather! We had never visited Dash Point and we really liked it. You come down from foothills above it and drive down to the park. When you come into the park there are large grassy areas with picnic tables, barbeque's, and several different playground areas for the kids. There were lots of large trees for shade and it all overlooked the beach area down below. This beach area actually opens up to Puget Sound and not directly to the Pacific Ocean. The water is still quite deep and extremely cold! You definitely don't want to swim in it! We had a great time there and spent several hours enjoying ourselves. Here are some more pictures of the day.
