I got home from Montana on Thursday, and on Sunday we took the boys to Chewelah, WA to check out Chataqua Days, an annual carnival kind of thing. It's an hour and a half drive to Chewelah, but there was a planned power outage and flash flood warnings with quarter sized hail predicted for Republic, so we decided it would be worth it to get out of town for the day. It was pretty fun. They had a bunch of rides set up, and little booths that had a bunch of hand made jewelry and stuff, Faith had a watch made for her out of old silverware that is pretty neat. The boys had loads of fun eating cotton candy and snow cones, riding all the rides, and playing little carnival games for stuffed animals. The picture above is their last ride on the small roller coaster. I took the pictures with my phone, because we forgot the camera. You may recall me saying that I believed the camera had been stolen out of the van. I still believe it was, but the thief must have felt bad, broke into the house, and hung the camera and camera bag in the coat closet under the winter coats for Faith to find.
Hopefully you can see Simon's expression. This was the Sky Machine, it goes back and forth and eventually spins all the way around, and pauses at the top so you're completely upside down a couple of times and just hanging from the harness praying that this isn't the time the stupid thing breaks. Simon rode it 3 or 4 times by himself, and somehow managed to talk me into once. I did not enjoy it as much as he did.
Bumper cars. They did this one a lot, Faith and I sat in the shade for an hour while they just ran around and got in line again every time it ended. Simon got rather intense while driving the car, and if someone bumped into him he gave them a look like he was going to hunt them down and kill them slowly, then would follow them around ramming them until somebody else ran into him, then the whole process would start over.
This is the first ride on the roller coaster, notice that they're both smiling.
After the first lap, notice that Dylan doesn't look like he's enjoying himself, hopefully you can see the look on his face. He shrieked almost the entire time, to the point that the operator looked over at me in concern like he was thinking about stopping the ride to let Dylan get off. When the ride finally ended Dylan jumped off and ran over and said "Did you hear me, I screamed like a girl the whole time!" He was laughing while he said it, and he rode it again, so must not have been too bad for him. There was a couple rides he didn't ride because he said he was too scared, the Octopus and the Sky Machine, but Simon rode everything.
This is from Montana, we watched this fire start at about 730 in the evening from a powerline knocked down by a windstorm, this picture was taken at about 8 pm. We ended up catching it at about 530 the next morning, at 9,500 acres. I had a pretty good trip, I got stuck working on night shift for 7 or 8 shifts, but night shift can be kind of fun. As long as you get food and good sleep during the day, neither of which was readily available at times. As a joke I'd told the guy I was working for that I needed 4 things from the management team: Maps, Communication, Resources (like hand crews and fire engines), and some fire to fight, the team was good about getting me 2 out of the four pretty consistently, usually resources and fire. After a few shifts on night shift and discovering that they were out of food for breakfast or they hadn't started cooking dinner yet and wouldn't until we were already supposed to be on the line, and spending way too much time either trying to find us a place to sleep or chasing shade around a campground, I asked if we could negotiate to get food and sleep added to my list of things I needed. Overall it was a great time, I ran into a couple of park rangers who knew Michael, one was from the Grand Canyon and one was from Utah. That's about it, I've had the last 3 days off, but I go back to work tomorrow. Today the kids and I are going for a bike ride while Faith's at work, then I'm going to go fishing when she gets home. Oh, I bought the kids new bikes on Friday, they were getting to big for their old ones, and about 15 minutes after getting home, Dylan ran into a parked car, hard enough to make his bike slide most of the way underneath it. That's what I hear anyway, I was in the garage looking for something, one of the guys living in the bunkhouse heard it happen and helped Dylan get his bike out then pushed it back up to the house for him. Hope everybody's doing well, see ya later.
