Funnies, Bunnies, and Blooms

Good morning, my friends. When I left you yesterday, I was thinking I'd wait until after our hike to blog again. But then we had so much going on yesterday, and I managed to take dozens of pictures again. Since I know I'll take bazillions of pictures on our hike today, it seemed like a good idea to cut down on the volume for my next post. We're planning to do our hike in a couple of hours...and bonus! It rained last night, but the forecast is for dry weather for the hike. Yay!

Okay, so backing up to yesterday afternoon, after driving for hours, we wanted to get out and walk around for a while before dinner with our friends. A couple of sites to our left is someone who lives here. They have a cute little elfin garden in front of their rig.

Along the way, we spotted lots of bunnies.

There's another one...

And there's another one over there.

Oh, and look! A Holstein bunny!

And a black bunny! Do you think it's bad luck to allow a black bunny to cross your path?

And, of course, I took pictures of every blooming thing.

And some autumn leaves.

This park where we're staying has a small number of sites for "campers," but there are a lot of residential folks here too. With Joint Base Lewis-McChord so close by (not to mention the number of military flags we spotted), I expect a lot of these folks are active-duty military. The mailboxes give some idea of the number of folks living here.

Some folks had their Halloween decorations out already.

Yes, please. We don't want any squished kitties. And if I know my cats, the cat will sit down in the middle of the road to groom itself before allowing you to pass.

It was getting to be time for us to go meet up with our friends for dinner. We drove into downtown Olympia, where I was able to get a good shot of the State Capitol building.

Turning directly around, we could see the Percival Dock.

There was a sign posted nearby explaining its historical significance.

In the image below, I've cropped in tighter on the text above to make it easier to read.

We were having dinner at the Olympia Oyster House.

Here's a little information about the oysters in the area.

This is the map that accompanied the text above.

And, oh my gosh, we had such a nice evening catching up with these near life-long friends. We asked our server to take our picture. Want to know what we're all laughing about?

Our server, Seth, was a hoot all evening long. When I asked him to take our picture, he said, "Oh, but let me take a picture of myself first." I thought he was kidding, but when I took the pictures off my phone this morning...HE ACTUALLY DID IT! Oh my gosh. That is hilarious. 

Okay, well hiking is ahead, although Mike has gone back to bed at this point. Maybe some word games and slow-stitching are in my future. In addition to the hike, we're meeting up with our friends again this evening. We're meeting up a little before dinner so that Andy can show us where the salmon are running. There might not be many at this time of year, but we'll see some sea lions and maybe some other wildlife too.

If you've enjoyed reading this post, you can thank Sadie for her careful editing.

We have one more night here, and then we'll move on to Forks, Washington, tomorrow. We'll be spending four days in Forks, exploring more of Olympic National Park. My thanks to my friend, Linda Kay, for cluing us into some road construction in that area. It looks like the worst of it will be happening days when we're not there. We'll keep monitoring it, and the heads up is appreciated.

All right then. Off I go. Hiking ahead. I've been looking forward to doing this hike for a long time.