September 10 has come and just about gone, and we still haven’t heard word one about our visas. This weekend, though, we helped prepare & serve a whole lot of food at the Western Roundup Dinner at Calvary Baptist Church. So, we haven’t been completely useless. We are going a bit stir crazy, though, so anyone who has anything interesting for us to do is free to let us know!

We’re enjoying our little vacation. Neither of us has been to St. Helens as an adult, so it was incredible to take a look at the damage and the recovery 27 years after the eruption.

I have to say that Weyerhaueser has done an amazing job of replanting the forest around the mountain, when you consider how little vegetation has colonized the blast zone naturally within the National Park boundary.

We’re in Long Beach right now, taking advantage of the wireless internet at the Long Beach Coffee Roasters. Great coffee.

We’ve got word that we should be getting our visas around September 10th. We’ll see how that actually works out, but in the meantime it means we don’t have to sit around here waiting to hear something. So, we’re off to camp at Mt. St. Helens and the Long Beach Peninsula for a while. It’s not the white sand beaches of Barra de Tijuca, but we’ll take it in the meantime.