Cool Desert Nights and Hot Summer Days

Hi family! Hope you aren't getting antsy for this weekend's post. I'm afraid I neglected to blog promptly. This past Friday was the PNNL/Battelle Salmon Bake (I thought the color was a nice touch). $5 for salmon and the chance to play on the big inflatable kids' stuff. There are some pictures of me losing the bungee race in the slide show. After the salmon bake, we went down to the uptown (it's really just a tacky shopping center) and watched the Cool Desert Nights car show. Anyone who thinks their car is remotely cool or classic enters the show and they drive in circles before they finally park in the big parking lot and we can look a little closer at them. Plenty of car pictures on my camera of course. There was a greeen VW bug with a clemson sticker on it. We hunted them down and talked to them. Very nice people.

Saturday was floating day. We had two inflatable kayaks, one canoe, two inner tubes, three tubing tubes, and a small "two person" raft that had oars. We tied the tubes to the canoe and my kayak, then we divided up the few paddles and made sure everyone had a life jacket. We put a cooler in two of the boats and put drinks in a bookbag that was tied to one of the inner tubes (the water was cold enough to keep things cold). We hopped in our "boats" and floated from the south side of PNNL to the other end of Richland (on the Columbia River). It took about 2/2.5 hours. After that, there was some volleyball played and napping done. We played Wii on Saturday night, which was quite fun, because the TV was absolutely massive.

Sunday was hiking day. We hiked Badger mountain near here (800 ft elevation gain, 1.4 miles each way). Very different from any hike I've ever done. NO TREES on the mountain. You can see some pictures of that in the slide show. You'll notice a picture from the top, where you can see the Columbia River. There is a region that has a lot of trees. That's Richland. The empty space to the left and back (north, along the river) is the Hanford Site. You can faintly see the reactors there. You can tell from that elevation that Richland's trees don't belong there. There is such an odd variety of trees here. They were brought in when the city was originally formed by the government (like I said before, the Oak Ridge of Washington for you Tennessee folks). I'm going on a bus tour of the Hanford Site tomorrow afternoon. Sadly, Reactor B (as in, the second one built...the one for plutonium production) is getting a new roof, so we are not going to be able to go inside and see the water pools and stuff. No pictures to come of that, but there will be plenty of pictures of the trip I'll be taking this weekend to Mt. Rainier. Yay camping! With no sleeping bags!