An Adventure

In December we had a little bit of snow. It didn't last long, but we had hopes that we would have more snow during the winter. (Last year we had snow in April.) We decided to buy the kids a sled, snow pants and snow boots in early January, but the weather never worked out to go sledding. It was either too warm and the sledding hill we were going to go to was closed or it was raining. I wanted to have fun, not be miserable.

This weekend was forcast to be beautiful and we decided we had one last chance to actually cut the tags off the snowpants and boots and go out to the snow. We decided to go to Mt. Rainier. Everything was perfect. We had lunches packed and managed to get out of the house by 8:30. Our plan was to return home in the early afternoon.

I showed Big Daddy where we were going on the computer and we had been to Mt. Rainier together, twelve years ago and since he refers to himself as a human map, I trusted him to get us there. That was mistake #1. We passed signs that said the highway was closed and I didn't question him. Mistake #2. I assumed that he knew something that I didn't and that he knew what he was doing. Mistake #3. All of these mistakes added up to us driving 2 hours to a road closed sign and needing to turn around. Ugh. We had driven towards Sunrise, which is closed in the winter. Apparently this was the only place at Mt. Rainier that Big Daddy had been to and assumed that it was the same place I was talking about.

There wasn't much we could do, but laugh about it and drive back down. After consulting the map again to show him where we were going, we decided that we would drive back around. We finally reached Paradise at 1:30, a full five hours after we had left our house!

It was beautiful with the clear skies and the sun shining. We all took turns going down the sliding hill in our sled. We had a great time. We spent about two hours sledding before the kids wanted to go home. We went home the correct way and it only took two hours. We were all more tired from sitting in the car than from walking up the hill many times.