No this isn't Washington DC

 Despite a little late night rain and morning clouds gathering in the distance, we decided to make the drive out to Mount St. Helens.  When we finally got to Johnston's Ridge Visitor Center, the clouds had cleared enough to get a great view of the inside of the crater - steaming lava mound and all.  Greg and I were discussing that it was weird that no one had actually caught the eruption on film and I was wondering why the kids had never heard of it - until we remembered that this "recent" eruption was almost 30 years ago - before most people even had video cameras.  The kids loved it - seeing the path of destruction was pretty sobering.  And now we know where they grow cell phone tower trees.  Due to weather, we decided that we could just view Mt. Rainier from distance and headed to Seattle.  This is where our trusty navigation system took a holiday.  We thought that we were 20 minutes from where we were staying and it took us almost 2 hours (and this after getting on and off I-5 3 times- I think we passed Bellevue at least twice).  Oh well - overall it still beats my map reading skills.  It did come to my attention that several of my children had no idea where we were - I clued in when one asked when we were going to the Smithsonian Museum.  So I hung a map in the RV so they could mark our route.  We took our bikes off the racks for the first time and there were a few issues (bent rims, broken brakes), so clearly our storage system is not quite as clever as we thought.  It might be a tad much to expect any rack to hold 6 bikes plus a tag-along.  We still went on the ride, but bike shop has been added to our to do list.