Friday: woke up "early" (about 8:45 or so) to get ready to go camping. We left the house around 10 or 11, picked up Derek in Lakewood and we were off. Went to the Bonney Lake Walmart to stock up on shit. It was... trashville. I guess you don't see a whole lot of that in Seattle and then you go to Bonney Lake Walmart and it's just all white trash. Got our stuff and we were on our way, got to the campsite sometime later in the afternoon. We went walking on the river a little bit, toured the campgrounds, went into town for a few things we forgot and then started the fire. Derek and Brandon went to bed kind of early, it was a long day and we were all tired. I hung out by the fire for a while... like really a long while, it was nice, I love campfires.

Saturday: Well, for starters, it was my birthday. And I was completely detached from civilization the whole day, it was different from all of my birthdays but awesome. We hiked to Silver Falls which was only 1.3 miles there but felt like a lot more. Of course I had to get closer than you are supposed to to the falls. It's pretty cool because you can get pretty much right next to the top of the falls. It is a little dangerous, but that just makes it more fun. Got a few angles on the falls and then headed back to the campsite for lunch. Then we wandered down the river a bit farther. There are a ton of logs and just really good potential for going down the river with some obstacles. The weather was really good, especially considering we were at Mt. Rainier. We decided to go driving a little bit. We drove past Packwood to Randle and stopped there, even though it's just a little redneck town. Drove back and kept going past our turn up to White Pass Ski Resort. We stopped by the visitor center at the campground and then headed back for burgers. We decided to go "beer for beer" so whenever anyone else had a beer the other two had to have a beer. So basically we were drinking beer for several hours straight.

Around 8:40 we were starting a fire with a little bit of obviously campground gathered firewood and a park ranger was walking up to talk to us so I think we were all a little worried. I just started the fire and he started talking about how they're doing a presentation at the amphitheater. For shits and gigs we decided to go to it. It was boring as hell, like about as boring as you can imagine, maybe even worse. It was on the "behind the scenes of the park" and let's just say the interesting parts of the park are what you see, not what's behind the scenes. There was this old guy farting quite audibly throughout the presentation, it was outrageous. Then we just went back to the campsite and continued building our beeramids, as I call them. I don't even really know what we talked about, but it was funny. I was convinced to drag a big log into the fire which ultimately was a subpar idea, we just ended up with a 10% burned huge log and we could get in trouble for burning wood we obviously did not bring. Then Brandon knocked over my beeramid, supposedly because I did something to his, but this filled me with rage and I grabbed Brandon from behind and threw him on the ground. He got a scrape on his knee. Eventually we went to bed, probably around 1, there were only a couple beers left.

Sunday: woke up and everyone was a tad effected by all the beer the night before. None of us really felt like doing anything and we had essentially exhausted all of our non-strenuous options the days before. So we came to the conclusion to just go to the "hot springs" (which were not far at all) and then head out a day early. The hot springs were a big letdown, although I saw pictures of them so I knew and tried to warn Derek and Brandon that they were lame, but they couldn't expect that to be it. It was really nice to leave early because I haven't had a true weekend day for a couple weeks so leaving early meant that today I could relax and sleep in and shit. Talked to Rayna for about an hour or so at night ON THE PHONE.

Monday: took a "personal day". I have not taken a day off for over 6 months so this was really nice. Watched Top Gear in the morning, the episode where they go to Miami and buy a car for $1000 and drive to New Orleans. It was hilarious. Eventually got out for a run. I stopped running around 4 miles or so and the entire trip was 7. It's been a while since I've run so I decided to ease into it a little bit (not to mention my foot started to feel like it had been pushing toward re-injury). Just a nice day off, altogether.