Old friends, new friends and a tired, screaming baby

This last weekend we went over to the Olympia area for a friend's wedding. We had a really great time! Mark said it was the best visit he has had over there. The wedding was really great and it was great for Mark to catch up with all his old friends and it was neat for me to get to meet the few that I hadn't yet met. We stayed at Micah and Disney's although they were in Moses Lake. We weren't there much of the time anyway. We arrived Friday evening and went pretty much straight to bed. Saturday morning we left early for Yelm and met up with Mark's friend, Jason. We all ran a few errands then headed to Centraila together for the wedding. We finally got back to Micah and Disney's around 9. In the morning, we drove to Olympia for church and went out for lunch with some friends after church. That morning we had checked the pass and it didn't look that great. So we headed out soon after lunch. We hit the pass around 5 and as we started ascending the rain turned into snow and Jack's heaving breathing turned into screaming. The snow got heavier and thicker but Mark was handling everything very well. I am deathly afraid of snow on the roadway so this was excruciatingly hard for me, not to mention Jack's screaming. We were about 3/4 of the way up the pass and just about to round a corner when there was someone stopped in the middle of the road. So we had to stop too. But then we couldn't get going again. We just started sliding backwards and into the other lane. Mark finally got us back into our lane but we thought we would have to wait for someone to pull us out. Mark is a really great driver and God was definitely with us because we were able to back up and finally get going. It was slow and painful and the wind was blowing about 30 mph so it was complete whiteout conditions at times, but we made it. Jack screamed all the way over the pass, finally we were able to stop and feed him and that helped a little. As we were about 40 miles out of Yakima we could see a little blue sky and sunshine between the mountains and we knew that was Yakima, our little oasis. Sometimes, I just love where we live!

Here are a few pictures of this weekend, courtesy of Brandy Hellemn.