Day ten

Seattle - Mount St Helens Tour! We left the hotel at 7.15am for the three hour drive to Mount St Helens National Park. We stopped on the way at a tiny place called Toledo (not where Klinger is from!) and had the best coffee of the whole holiday from a dirty service station.

We then went to the County Park to have our morning tea. While we were there these Canada Geese flew overhead.
This is what the park looked like:
This was one of our first views of Mount St Helens.
Here are some more shots:

This is a view of the river plain which was covered in many metres of ash and rock. The water is slowly carving another channel for itself.

And here are The Hummocks, a topographical feature caused by the ground swelling after the eruption.

Updates, updates

We now have an itinerary for the Seattle and Mount St Helens tour. It includes a helicopter flight over the blast zone! So excited! It will be a long day (12 hours in total) but should be good fun. The boy is very excited. This is a sample of what our tour will be like.

We have discovered no plugs, so need to get those at some point. Also: we have not bought the boy's suitcase. That will be a job for this weekend.

I think I need another pair of gloves. I'm worried about being cold!

Four weeks and four days to go. I can really feel the holiday mood descending on me now!

Mount St Helens Tour

The boy has decided what he wants to do about visiting Mount St Helens. Click here to get an idea of what he has planned. Or I should say, what he wants me to plan. Apparently I am "good at this stuff" so I should be the one to organise it. Does that seem fair to anyone else? I thought not.

But let's face it, if I don't do it, we won't be going. And then he'll complain about missing out and we can't have that now. I have to email the travel agent to find out exactly what day we arrive in Seattle so I can contact these people. I get all the good jobs.

Mount St Helens

This is what Mount St Helens looked like in July 2007. The boy is very excited about going to see it. Two years ago we saw an active volcano in Vanuatu so I'm not sure about the attraction of this one. I suppose it's considered active, having erupted only 28 years ago. Anyway, since the polar bears are my thing, the volcano part is for him. I'm sure it will be interesting.