It’s crazy to think that we’ve been on the road for 3 entire weeks, as of today. So far we’ve travelled about 9,000 km and by the time we make it home we should be close to 10,000 km.
We left the Pendleton KOA just after 9am and we were headed for Grand Mound, Washington. We planned to wrap up our trip with a night at the Great Wolf Lodge.
As we left Pendleton, we had crazy headwinds and lots of clouds but as we carried on towards Portland, the clouds burned off but the wind intensified
We drove along the Columbia River and noticed the incredible rock formations along the river; Jon and I pointed them out to the boys as looking fascinating and wondering what they were.
Jude pipes up from the back seat and nonchalantly says, “Oh that’s basalt.”
What??? So I google and sure enough the Columbia River Basalt Group is what we were looking at. Basalt is a dark, fine-grained volcanic rock that sometimes displays a columnar structure. (According to Wikipedia)
How did Jude know that?
Gaming.
Apparently, Basalt is a type of rock found in more than one game that he plays. It’s been incredible to have this time together. There is so much that both boys have shared that I had no idea that they knew and lots of the information is stuff that I didn’t even know.
One of the sights I have loved seeing is the graffiti on the different train cars. We saw a surprising number of trains on our travels. I took these two photos yesterday but these are not even remotely the most complicated nor the most colourful tags we saw. There are some incredibly talented artists out there playing with shapes and colours in stunning ways.
We made it to the Great Wolf Lodge around 3:30pm and were able to check in a little early as our room was ready. The boys were thrilled to have a real bed, decent wifi and to go crashing in the wave pool. I only got 2 photos of our time in water park. We were just too busy having fun.
Jon and Siah went on a water slide that free fall dropped them down a chute; and they said it was AWESOME!
This was a great ending to a fabulous trip. We have one more day of driving to get home. It’s exciting and sad that our trip is over. I kind of love the duality of life. That we can hold space for conflicting emotions and that it’s okay to be both happy and sad in regard to the same event.
