Marching Band Spirit Week

Last full week of band camp was spirit week. Benji is not as enthusiast about spirit as Abby always was, but he did try. Here he is on "frat boy" day. We have the weirdest spirit days in the South:

Girls' Trip to DC

 The first week of August, I was scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., to help with a recruiting event (a first for me). They put me up in a really nice hotel right next to the White House, so I asked Abby if she wanted to come along. The original plan had been for us to get a nice dinner and stroll around the monuments at night, but that got derailed because (1) Julia got COVID and missed saying goodbye to Abby in Portland; and (2) it was pouring rain. So, the girls made plans for Jules to come in to the city to hang out in the afternoon while I was at the first of my two events (the second was breakfast the next morning), and the three of us had a very late dinner in what we hoped was a break in the storm (not so much):

Checking out the view of the Washington Monument

Abby shared these pictures of herself and Julia caught in the afternoon storm while goign out for boba tea and cookies

Waiting for our table at Zaytinya

The food was amazing. You can't really tell in this picture, but it was POURING all around us

BLAST Camp 2022

The day after CHAMPS, we dropped Benji off at UVA for a three-day STEM camp. BLAST (Building Leaders to Advance Science and Technology) is a program run by the Virginia Space Grant Consortium and puts on three free camps every summer (one at UVA, one at Virginia Tech and one at Old Dominion). The program is for rising 9th and 10th grade students and has a competitive application process (a counselor told Benji there were 1200 applicants for the 80 spots available). Benji was thrilled to be chosen and had an amazing time:

Dropping him off at his dorm

Camp started with an address from astronaut Kathy Thornton. Benji us holding a picture of her from her Hubble mission and texted us this after he got to meet her

VSGC posted pictures on Facebook so we could get a look at what he was doing. This is his Mars Rover group with their robot

Benji in the background. I think they were working with spectrographs here

Tour of UVA. Benji conveniently wore an orange UVA shirt so we could pick him out in pictures.

At the observatory where they got to observe a nebula through the big telescope and attended a program on black holes

Stopping by the stadium. Since Benji was the only kid from Charlottesville, this was apparently a big thrill for the rest of them

Group picture

The Spanish Tutor

Today is the last weekday Abby will be home with us before college, although it will still take the blog  a couple of weeks to catch-up. We had a great summer with very little down time, but when she and Benji have had a quiet day, she's been trying to get him ready for Spanish II this fall after a one-year gap since taking Spanish I. Several times I came home from work to find them like this, with her overseeing him doing some worksheet or other she prepared for him. Fingers crossed that it helped!:

Abby Birthday Poster 2022

 Abby was delighted and surprised when she received her birthday poster rom Pop-Pop this year and it depicted Multnomah Falls:

CHAMPS 2022

 Even though he missed three weeks of the swim season, Benji was still excited to participate in the championship match at UVA that ends the season. He got in a full week of practice post-trip and was ready to go. He swam 4 races -- two relays and then free and fly - and got placements ribbons for both relays and a heat winner ribbon for fly:

Ready to jump off the blocks at his first relay

He stayed underwater for a long time (which is a good thing)

Swimming with the UVA ribbons all around

Heat Winner

Win captured on the big screen

Thor: Love and Thunder at the Drive-In

This came out while we were on our trip and we rushed to see it while it was still showing at the drive-in. Here we are playing password in the tailgate while waiting for it to get dark:

Kevin's 47th Birthday

To cap a week filled with cake, we celebrated Kevin's birthday that Sunday with a "picnic" (we stayed inside because it was 100 degrees) of fancy breads and cheeses and a cake from Ben and Jerry's:

Abby's Birthday, part 2

Since we did not get to do much celebrating on the road, we had a redo birthday dinner at home with Gammy. Kevin made pop-pop's famous pasta and I made a chocolate-orange bundt cake, both at Abby's request:

National Junk Food Day

Our return to Charlottesville was more than a little bumpy. We arrived back in Virginia to find the van dead at the airport and did not all get home until almost three in the morning on Wednesday. After sleeping in on Wednesday, we started to get settled and unpacked only to discover a giant hornet's nest in the front yard and that our air conditioning was not working. By Thursday we had zero desire to cook, but luckily it was national junk food day, so we settled for a selection of our favorite snacks and a movie in the coolest room in the house - the playroom:

On the Road Again: Leavenworth, Snoqualmie, Tacoma, Olympia

We woke up in Winthrop and took a little bit of time to see the town, since it was largely closed when we had arrived. We walked around the historical site before moving on:

We probably could have headed straight back to Portland after Winthrop, but decided to add an extra night to see Leavenworth, WA, a small town in the mountains that has turned itself into a Bavarian village. On the way, we stopped in the small town of Cashmere, home of Aplets and Cotlets :

Kind of like Turkish Delight. We gave them a try; they are disgusting

Arriving in Leavenworth is sort of surreal because all of the businesses are required to follow the theme, so even the grocery stores and Starbucks look like they are in a Bavarian village:

Our hotel for the night

The town is nestled in the mountains, so everything is picturesque:

Leavenworth was beautiful, but also SO crowded on a Sunday afternoon. After about 20 minutes walking around, we beat it out of town for the nearby Pennstock trail, built along an old gas pipeline with beautiful views of the Wenatchee River:

Bridge made out of the cut pipeline

As per every trail we took, there were beautiful wildflowers:

And a baby squirrel in a tree!

The light was nice on the return hike and by the time we got back to the center of town, the crowds had died down and we enjoyed a nice dinner in a biergarten:

We walked along the absolutely deserted streets for a little while on Monday morning before starting the drive back towards Portland:

First stop, Snoqualmie Falls:

Followed by Tacoma for lunch (we were starving by the time we got there) and a quick tour of Point Defiance Park:

We were so hungry, this hole-in-the-wall soup shop tasted amazing

High school where 10 Things I Hate About You was filmed

Instead of roses, Tacoma has a dahlia test garden

We took a quick peak at Fort Defiance but opted to get back on the road rather than spend a lot of time there

Last stop, Olympia where we walked around the capital complex:

We spent the night in Vancouver, Washington, just outside Portland to make it easier to catch what was supposed to be an early morning flight. After several delays, we finally got in the air. The view from the plane window on Mount Hood was a final bonus from the PNW:

Back to home life tomorrow!