A stop at Kettle River!

Hi everyone- we are back in the states now. We left the Lawrence's house around 10 yesterday(Friday) morning. We traveled about 5 hrs. to Colville, Washington, back to the hotel that we had stayed at on our way to Canada. I wanted to share a few pictures of our family and the Lawrence family off of their balcony. You can see the mountains in the backgroung and the lake is below the trees. They truely live in a beautiful area. The other pictures on the collage is an area that we just stumbled upon. We were on the way to Colville and all of a sudden Jeff pulls over off to the side of the road. It scared me to death b/c I was sleeping. He said, "Look! That is so beautiful down there, let's climb down there into that river." We found out later that the river was the Kettle River and it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been too. Look at the very middle picture!(Lanaya- you probably remember this river!) We climbed and hiked over the rocks, to beautiful sandy bars with water so clear you could see to the bottom. The younger girls made no bones about peeling off their clothes and jumping right in! Jeff and Jenna as they were exploring farther along the beach and climbing across more rocks saw a BEAR PAW PRINT!!! They quickly hightailed it back to us. We really can imagine a bear going into the middle, standing on the rocks and scooping up the fish as they float by. For the most part this was a high point on our trip! Mikayla and Haley were throwing rocks into the water and Mik accidently nailed Jeff right in the back of the head. I thought he was going to pass out! He was in terrible pain, and Mikayla was crying b/c she felt so bad and I was watching out for bears! At that point we decided to climb back up and head to the van. We did dig a huge rock out of the stream and bring it home with us as a memento. The girls are holding it in the picture, it is reddish brownish, very pretty.

Today we left Colville around 10 and arrived in Missoula, Montana.(University of Montana is here) We checked into our hotel and then got some supper. Leah, there is a TJ Maxx here so we stopped in there to see if we could find that same back pack and we did but Jenna didn't really like it. I bought a backpack for Mik and Haley, Jeff bought a shirt and I bought and skirt and a pair of capri's. And all we went in for was a backpack for Jenna. She is going to keep looking.

The girls are swimming now and then we will head up to our room to sleep. We have to be up and out early so we can get to Yellowstone tomorrow with plenty of time to see things. We will stay all night there tomorrow night, do some more sight-seeing on Monday a.m. and then begin our journey home. We are going to try and get 18 hrs. between Mon. afternoon and Tues. so we can get home Tues. evening. We are just having an absolutely wonderful time, but are ready to get back to normalicy of life in our own home. I should go, the girls are done swimming. I will post more tomorrow night of Yellowstone. Thanks for reading!