Cowboy Camping
Leah went cowboy camping with her horse buddies and teachers at Cowboy Campsite just east of Sedro-Woolley. If I didn’t have a horsey daughter, I never would have known about this place. Horse folks own campsites, which they have tricked out with little outbuildings, signs, and cowboy-themed paraphernalia. They bring their horses for the weekend to ride the network of trails on the nearby DNR land (I think that’s who owns it). For horse people, riding trails and camping out with the horses is pretty much the bees’ knees, I’m learning. Leah came home wiped out and happy.
The Museum of Flight
While Leah was camping and riding, we were driving to Seattle to check out the Museum of Flight in south Seattle. If you haven’t been here, it’s worth a visit. And if you’re the parent of young boys, you must check it out. Airplanes and war stories galore. The museum documents the history of early aviation with the Wright brothers and others who contributed, as well as the role of aviation in the two World Wars. Lots of war stories. I learned so much (I think I must have slept through in history class). There’s also an area devoted to space travel, as well as a huge room filled with planes, and even some historical flight attendant uniforms on display, some of them really bad—the 70s, no surprise. Ty was disappointed that we had to leave at closing time, and that, I can say, is a first.
Olympic Game Farm
We did a driving tour through the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim while we were visiting my sister and her family. It 
actually feels a bit like a mini-Yellowstone, but unlike Yellowstone, it doesn’t provide any education to the visitors about wild animals. Well, it does, actually: Do Not Get Out of Your Car. But people don’t follow directions very well. They didn’t get out of the car, but they hung out their windows and through their sunroofs. They tried to pet the zebras, who were said to be capable of biting. And although all the signs said not to feed the bison, the staff sells loaves of bread at the farm’s entry to feed all the other animals (Grizzlies, yaks, zebras, and elk), and do you think people stop with the bread when they get to the bison? But of course not. And here’s the other thing about animals and feeding them. They get habituated to the bread, and they chase your car down even if you don’t have bread. They’re not running or anything, but watching massive elk and bison eyeball you through your window and then walk right up (the elk) and lick them is darn unnerving. Especially since we were told to keep the car moving because it’s bison mating season, and recently they’ve damaged a lot of cars. Of course, everyone stopped, and for me it became a game of choosing where to stop so we didn’t get caught in a bison cluster behind an idiot car. Maybe I’m just too uptight about following directions, but I just wasn't up for experimenting. And if you have your windows down to throw the bread out (everyone but us), the elk will stick their heads right into your car. I felt a little like I was in the mammal version of Jurrasic Park. We didn’t buy bread, by the way, because I have a thing about not feeding wild animals, and though my kids were disappointed at first, they fast changed their minds when they saw the elk heads going inside cars. After Yellowstone, where you’re not even supposed to get too close, this place is kind of freaky, but it was still fun in a perverse, bad-movie-kind-of-way—an education on the habits of people more than anything.