Wrapping it up, 7th and last stop of our vacation.

 This bridge, wow! Since we followed the coast all the way back we had to take this bridge to get from Oregon back into Washington. It was exciting, but I'll have to admit I was a bit of a nervous wreck. It's a very, very, very long bridge!

I had the nervous giggles for the majority of the time, and I might have said a prayer or two. ;)

I felt much relief snapping a picture from the other side! 

We are officially back in Washington. Oh Washington how I love you! It's fun to visit other places but my heart will always belong to good ol' Washington. :) Every time we leave I feel such joy and peace when we get back.

Barbecuing photo bomb! ;)

Okay this last stop on our trip was the worst! Such a gross campground, we will never be back. Very disappointed, since as I just declared I love Washington and was looking forward to some nice camping. There are many, many wonderful campgrounds in Washington… This was not one of them! Lets put it this way, the kids entertained themselves by putting on gloves and picking up trash in the bushes. Gross! But proud of my little conservationists. ;) So anyone in this area on the peninsula, do not camp at Potlatch State Park. Unless you just go camping to party and get drunk… then you might fit right in. I was once again very thankful for the trailer, and a door that locked. We decided to make the best of it though, and we did enjoy our favorite meal of the trip here. :)

Ira showing off his finger. 

Can you tell I was feeling a little clingy after the whole finger incident. Yeah, I hardly let him out of my sight for the rest of the trip. I went a little over board with all of them. I became a helicopter. ;) 

He on the other hand was super proud of his unfortunate adventure and subsequent bandaged finger. And very, very excited about the prospect of a scar and telling the whole story to anyone who would listen. Sigh.

Taking pictures with Ira of course lead to all the children wanting to take pictures with me, ha ha! So we had a little mini photo session. Thank you to our family photographer Ira. ;) He loves taking pictures, well they all do, but Ira is the best at it right now.

Me and my redhead. I love that he still has those adorable cheeks.

I love how these all turned out, but I wish I'd thought to take pictures of just the kids, they would have turned out so cute. :)

Love this silly, full of life, vibrant girl. :)

I love, love, love that we caught his amazing natural smile in this picture. He looks so grown up!

Of course I need a picture with Ryder as well. :)

Can you spot the photo bomber in this picture? :) Clue… bright red hair!

This dinner was awesome. Bacon wrapped chicken with pineapple and apple pieces on a skewer and a simple coleslaw. So, so good!

After dinner we headed out on a walk, to keep up our traditions of after dinner exploration. It was an okay trail, not all that exciting. But it did start out straight up hill, wow.

Pausing for a moment to breath. Leiella felt it was the perfect opportunity to try and stick a leaf behind her ear. ;) It didn't work out very well.

Sweaty after dinner hikes, probably should have let our food settle a bit first. ;) I was trying to get a picture of me with the awesome big ferns behind me, didn't work out so well, ha ha!

I think it's funny that you can tell how done Ryder and I were from the pictures at this campground. We didn't really recover all of our vacation sparkle after the whole Ira incident. Plus in this picture all the kids decided that they couldn't make it back to camp and just had to use the disgusting outhouse bathrooms in the campground. They were hot and the smell was seriously overwhelming and I was already sweaty and it was just overall nasty. The whole campground could probably hear me telling the kids to Not Touch Anything!!! Over and over again. 

When we made it back I surprised them all with marshmallows to roast. :) Atty roasted his banana, a favorite of his. One last camping campfire. It was a must have. ;) My kids declared the roasted apples by far better than the marshmallows, but that didn't stop them from stuffing themselves with them, haha! 

The next day we headed to Port Townsend to take the ferry to Coupeville. We got to Port Townsend early (Because we left first thing in the morning, didn't want to hang out at Potlatch SP longer than necessary!) so we headed to Fort Worden and the Point Wilson lighthouse.

It was just what we needed. Lifted our spirits right back up again. :)

It was really nice to end with a ferry ride instead of heading back toward I5. It was really expensive so my husband was thinking about driving around, even though we had talked about the options when planning the trip and he agreed to the ferry. I eventually talked him into the ferry ride (again) and in the end he was really glad we went that way. It as a nice break for the man that drove the Whole Way!

I think they were tired of me snapping so many pictures of them, ha ha!

Goodbye ferry, hello our neck of the woods. :) Getting closer!

Deception Pass bridge, not as intense as the Astoria bridge, but very narrow and high up. I've been over it a few times though, and survived, so I wasn't as freaked out. ;) Beautiful views!

Back home to my glow in the dark garden. Ahhhhh, so good to be home.

Over all we had an amazing experience. The suburban worked hard pulling that trailer and did not disappoint. :) I am totally and completely sold on trailer camping vacations. :) 

Now to start planning out next adventure. I'm thinking maybe destination Utah? We could hit parts of Oregon, Idaho and Nevada that we've never been before. I'm not sure if we can do that next year, but I'm definitely keeping that in mind for our next really big adventure, might take a few years to save up. :) We really want to see our friends in Texas, so for now we are saving for that. We might just fly, for the first time ever with the kids. I'd rather drive, personally, but that would be quite the undertaking. Even though it's ridiculously expensive for us to all fly there, it will still be cheaper than a road trip. We want to go this year, because they weren't able to come visit us again this summer and we really, really miss them. But we already had the Redwood trip planned and reservations made, so we couldn't change plans at the last minute when we found out they couldn't come. If it's possible we might go in December. Banden has decided that that would be the best Christmas present ever, and the rest of us agreed. But that means we wouldn't be spending much on anything else this Christmas season and probably wouldn't be doing any big trips next summer as well. So we will see. If we wait until next summer to visit them it will be over three years since we've seen them last, and I can hardly stand that idea. It's hard to have your best friend move away. Or I should say best friends as Banden and my best friends oldest daughter were really close as well. Leiella misses her younger daughter a lot as well and talks about her all the time. Anyways enough of that, now I'm getting sad.

Next up I'm posting our menus, I personally love getting menu ideas, especially for camping. :)