As I promised a while ago, here’s the introduction for the Church family’s latest adventure! But first, I guess I’ll do a family update…
Church Family Update
It’s been an eventful few months since I last posted on my blog. Shortly after our second road trip to the Northeast, I started my final year of graduate school (having finished my MS in Accounting) to pursue the second part of my degree, an MBA in Analytics, and Mom and Dad resumed their normal lives.
Dad is keeping the bustling metropolis of Granite Falls functioning after surviving a massive fire and a spree of tornados, and Mom has now “officially” retired (aka finally filed for retirement).
Mom managed to spill a bag of flour in/around/all over the pantry on Christmas morning. While I was cleaning up handfuls of flour, Dad went to the basement to get some new shelf liner, only to discover our water heater had emptied its contents on the basement floor. Eventually we got it fixed, but the only temporary solution was to shut the water off for the entire house on Christmas Day, since the valve on the water heater was broken.
I finished out Christmas Day by getting choked on a piece of steak in the afternoon. I didn’t die, and everything worked out thankfully! I guess after years of relatively normal holidays, we were due some excitement.
In other happenings, I’ve been even more involved lately with the worship team at ABF as we undergo a personnel transition, have worked on a few web design projects on the side, and have managed to clean out and reorganize all the storage areas in our house.
Spring Trip
Mom has decided to fly with us. No, I’m not making that up. This might be the most significant event of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The last time she was on a plane, she was ~17 years old when she rode in an 8-seat crop duster over the ocean at Long Beach, was severly traumatized, and has refused to go near a plane ever since. If the tickets weren’t un-cancelable, I’m not sure I’d believe she was coming along. This is an even bigger step than taking our first road trip to Maine two years ago.
If you’ve gotten over your shock, I guess it’s time for the big reveal: we’re heading to the Pacific Northwest! We tossed around the idea of going to San Fransisco, a combination of the PNW and SFO, or a few other places, but eventually settled on this trip for a complicated variety of reasons of which I will spare you an explanation.
Yes, it will be somewhat cold; yes, it will be raining; yes, it’s a long way from home; but we are all thoroughly excited about the trip!
As always, along the way we expect to encounter plenty of scenery, plenty of good food, and plenty of unexpected adventure.
Our current plan is to visit Seattle, WA; Vancouver, BC; Victoria, BC; Portland, OR; and the surrounding areas.
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Thanks for reading, and I look forward to once again sharing our adventures with you!
P.S.
If Mom doesn’t make it past the first leg of our flight out, we’ll need a volunteer to drive to Houston to pick her up at the airport there…
P.P.S.
Not to give too much away, but here’s a quick, abbreviated list of exciting things about this trip:
- This will be the first time Mom and I have seen the Pacific Ocean.
- Weather permitting, we’ll be visiting the snowiest and the rainiest place in North America (Mt. Baker and Hoh Rain Forest). It’s not looking good for Mt. Baker though, since the current snow base is around 20 feet deep.
- We’ll visit the westernmost point in the contiguous United States.
- Waterfalls
- Volcanos
- We’ll potentially cross 3 national parks (Mt. Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades) off our list – I’ve set a personal goal of visiting all 59 in my lifetime.
- Food (of course, did you think I’d forgotten?)
