Around this time last year, Paulette came up with the idea of taking the kids down to Mt St Helens as a kind of family field trip. Alex's school has the kids do show-and-tell, and encourages them to talk about things that start with the "sound of the week" -- that would be the letter of the week, but that's not how they teach reading at his school, they teach sounds -- and the letter V (or, rather, the sound V) was a few weeks away. Paulette's idea was that we could see the volcano one day, and then spend the rest of the weekend visiting friends in Portland, OR and hitting the Saturday Market.

A side note about the Portland Saturday Market: ten summers ago, some friends from my Cornell days and I converged on Portland for a mini-reunion that we have every year (each year in a different city), and we went to the Saturday Market as part of our weekend. While there, I saw a photographer's exhibit that was simply breathtaking, and I very much wanted to buy one of his custom-framed prints. It was amazing. But, I was also only two months away from getting married, and I wanted to make sure that Paulette wouldn't mind me blowing a big wad of cash on a piece of art just before we dropped an even bigger wad of cash on our wedding.

As it turned out, she and I have very similar tastes in art, but since we'd never really acquired any art up to that point, I wanted to clear it with her. The photographer didn't believe in having business cards -- he said he never sold any of his work by using them -- so I figured I'd just run back down to Portland to pick up his stuff on some future weekend.

I've never seen him at the Portland Saturday Market since then, but whenever I'm down there, I always look. I don't know his name. But I know I'd recognize his work if I ever saw it again. It was that amazing.

Anyway, circumstances interfered with the Mt St Helens trip last year, but this year, we made it happen... and, just in time for hitting the letter 'V' again this year. Or the sound, 'V'. Whatever. Paulette and I bundled up the kids in the minivan for what is expected to be our last family adventure together before the anticipated arrival of Baby 3.0.

We left after work on Friday, April 18th. Let me make a comment about April in the Seattle area: it never snows. At least, there's no record of snow accumulating in Seattle after April 1st. In late April, the tulips are already in bloom, and most of the trees have already flowered if not grown their leaves. As we were getting ready to leave, I had to snap a photo of the blanket of snow threatening our tulips. Crazy, crazy.

We drove down to a town near Mt St Helens; the plan was to make a hotel there our base of operations and we went back and forth between points Washington and Oregon. The hotel was ready and waiting for us, we all got a good night's sleep, and had a pleasant breakfast before heading off to the visitor center at Mt St Helens.

The lava caves we had hoped to visit were closed due to snow. In fact, so were just about all of the vantage points except for the main visitor center, which was far enough away from the mountain that the snowfall (it was still snowing) made it impossible to see. There was a little movie about the big eruption in 1980, and a scale model of the volcano and surrounding area that you can walk through. Nolan loved that part, while Alex preferred the movie.

We had a good visit at the center, but I was nonetheless a little disappointed that we didn't get the see the volcano.

After a refreshing dip in the pool and hot tub at our hotel (Nolan and Alex both absolutely love swimming. However, Nolan is still learning, so the hot tub was more agreeable to him because he could stand on the bench seats and didn't have to worry about actually swimming swimming), we headed down to Portland to visit with our friends Bjorn and Kirsten.

We had a fantastic evening. Excellent conversation, excellent food at a local Italian restaurant that was kid friendly, more excellent conversation, and just an all-around agreeably relaxing time was had by all. I've been a little out of sorts lately, and there's nothing like a pleasant evening with old friends to put one's mind at ease.

I must mention (if you haven't visited the link already to Bjorn's site) that Bjorn has an airplane named Superboy. In fact, if I recall correctly, Alexander's first plane ride was in Superboy. Bjorn loves to fly, and he told us he'd be happy to take us for a look at Mt St Helens if the weather for the next day turned out to be as good as the forecast claimed.

Although we have a lot of friends in Portland and surrounding areas, we ended up not making any other plans for the weekend, since we weren't sure how the kids would do on the trip. Sunday morning, we went to Saturday Market (I love saying that -- "Sunday, at the Saturday Market..."), and Alex was pretty obviously not happy to be dragged around while his parents wanted to look at the artsy-fartsy stuff on display. I did not find the photographer I'd been looking for these past ten years, nor did I expect to, but I can still hope that someday I'll bump into him again.

We had an appropriate lunch (Mmmm... outdoor market food) and then phoned Bjorn to see if he was still up for a plane ride. Silly me. The boys love airplanes, and Bjorn loves to fly. The weather was cooperating, so *of course* everyone was up for a ride.

Bjorn was so gracious with the kids. He had Alex help out by checking the fuel and plugging in the rear headsets. The plane may not look big, but it was able to hold me (and I'm pretty big) and Paulette (who is flying for two) and Nolan in the back seat, while Alex flew shotgun in the co-pilot's chair.

As it so happened, we flew up into a big bevy of clouds, but we found a hole that enabled us to get up above the cloud cover. ("Why not just fly through the clouds?" "Because the temperature up here is below freezing, and the plane would ice up very quickly if we tried.") At this point, it became obvious that we might see nothing but overcast skies (well... undercast, I guess, since we were above the clouds) blanketing the mountain, but what the heck, we were already in the air. So, we headed to Mt St Helens to see what we could see.

Keep in mind, just getting the boys up for a flight made for a wonderful time, and Paulette and I enjoyed sitting next to each other in the cozy back seats. But if we could actually get some snapshots of the mountain while we were there, well... so much the better. In fact, I should make this point if it hasn't become obvious already: Mt. St. Helens was the McGuffin for our trip. It was the excuse; it was not the reason. The reason was to get us out as a family, enjoying some different scenery and different settings. The goal was to leave work and the daily chores behind for a little while. That said....

Miles and miles of big, white, fluffy clouds rolled by beneath us while Alex enjoyed being the co-pilot and Nolan played with his trains. Then we saw a break in the clouds, near where the volcano should be, and lo and behold... Wow, what a view. We were so close to the crater, we could see the plumes of steam roiling up into the air. (For those who don't know, the volcano is still active... it's just not erupting at present.)

We snapped our photos. Alex would have some neat print-outs for his show-and-tell that week. All-in-all, though, it was just cool the way the weekend all came together. We had some pleasant quiet time as a family, enjoyed a soothing, low-key visit with gracious friends, and then had a private tour of a snow-capped volcano. A magically delicious weekend.

If a picture's worth a thousand words, let me leave you with this: