raising heller

this has been one of the most all-american 4th of july’s we’ve had together as a family (and we’re not even done yet!). let me give you a run-down of our activities thus far.

we started off with a hike with some friends through cougar mountain. we hiked a couple of miles and the kids were pretty good about it. asher wasn’t too stoked to walk so we ended up carrying him for quite a bit of it. below is the partial map of our walk. i use an app on my iphone called runkeeper that fully maps out walks and runs and the like. it’s actually pretty rad. it will show you the route you took as well as your speed throughout the activity. it even maps out your elevation changes. i forgot to start the app until about 1/2 mile into our hike so it’s incomplete and at one point it shows our speed at around 900mph which i think is a little off.

following the hike we headed over to a neighborhood 4th of july party. it was seriously taken straight from a norman rockwell painting. there were gunny sack races and beanbag tossing and face painting… it was awesome. couple that with the fact that there was free lunch and i was SOLD! unfortunately, most of the pictures didn’t turn out as i had the ISO on my camera set way high and they turned out really grainy. there are the few i got that turned out okay.

all in all, it was a pretty great day. well, it’s not even over yet, but i don’t know what we’re doing this evening. if it’s noteworthy, i’ll post an update.

P.S. – here’s a pano of the park where we had lunch.

P.P.S. – we ended up going to the muckleshoot indian reservation or, “the res” as they call it, to watch a bunch of maniacs light fireworks. seriously, they were all crazy. here’s a pano of the scene, straight out of apocalypse now.

photos, words