Huh? Slept with a baby raccoon? No, just like one.

Day 11.

Woke up after a fantastic night of sleep to the sun shining. Looking at my watch it, was already 7:40, which is late since we normally are up by 6:30.  I slept like a baby, a raccoon baby as Nathan says (b/c of wearing sunglasses I don’t have a tan beneath them and so I look like a raccoon!). Along the way to the Mt. Rainier, we stopped for a bite to eat at a roadside dinner. The dinner was cool. It was old railroad cars put together to make dinning rooms. After standing there for a few minutes, we were finally met by a waitress, who told us to give her a minute and we would be seated. We waited a few more minutes and finally we were seated. We looked at the menu and decided what we wanted. Soon after that the waitress came and got our drink order. It was several minutes before those came and then we waited some more for her to come back and take our order. All the while we were waiting, we had to listen to the strange conversation of the overly loud people sitting one table away. Granted, that did conjure up some good humor. Eventually, we placed our order and lucky for us, the food didn’t take that long to fix and was soon at our table. I must say it was good too. After finishing, we had to wait some more before the bill was brought too us. Finally, with it paid we were able to escape with our youth…or at least part of it. What we were hoping to be a sort of short stop, turned into an hour!! Even with the delay, we made it to Mount Rainier National Park. The mountain was hard to see b/c of the clouds though. We caught a few glimpses of it and those were fantastic.

Our first look at the mountain in the park.

It smiled for a close up.

A great picture of the peak with clouds beneath.

 We did some hiking on some trails to a couple of different waterfalls. Those are always fun to see.

Carter Falls.

Christine falls that we drove by.

My favorite waterfall there Narata Falls. If you look closely, you can 

see a rainbow in the bottom right side of the picture.

 We also hiked through an ancient forest that had MASSIVE Cedar and Douglas Fir trees.

Nathan at the base of a giant Cedar tree.

 We finally made it to our campsite near laughingwater creek and started a fire. We had just put our cans of spaghetti and beefaroni on when out neighbor came over and said they had some stew left over and asked if we wanted any. We accepted. They also gave us what was left of their bread to dunk in it since they were leaving in the morning. A little bit later they came over with a bundle of kindling for our fire. Apparently, they had a tub full of it. We were sure to thank them greatly. By 9:30 Nathan and I were both tired, so we put out what was left of our fire and went to bed.