August 17th: Fortunately for me, my trip to the west coast was pretty uneventful. I had a connecting flight to Seattle from Dallas, and the only hiccup on the trip was having to wait on the Dallas runway for about half an hour because a bunch of planes were rushing in to takeoff because of an approaching thunderstorm. However, my plane did eventually lift off and managed to avoid the storm. When I got to Seattle about 10 minutes later than the projected arrival time, I tried calling Orca since all of our flights were scheduled to arrive within 5 minutes of each other, and I got her voicemail. But I figured well, maybe her flight still hasn't touched down yet, so I proceeded to pick up my luggage and call MrMonk. When MrMonk picked me up at the pickup area, he gave me the quick rundown that Tochi was stuck in Vancouver due to a luggage packing mishap, and Orca somehow ended up in Las Vegas due to a thunderstorm in Newark messing up her flight schedule. Tochi wouldn't be able to get a flight to Seattle till the next morning, and Orca had either a flight into Seattle at 2 am or 4 am the next day. In the meantime, MrMonk and I had a quick bite to eat at the Purple Dot, and we retired to his hut for some quick shuteye at around 11 pm.
August 18th: MrMonk woke up I'm guessing at around 3:30 to 4 am to pick up Orca and didn't return till about 5 am. MrMonk immediately jumped back into bed to catch some extra shuteye in anticipation to picking up Tochi, and I was conscious at around 5:15 am but couldn't get back to sleep, so I went to talk with Orca for a bit about her flight adventures. At around 5:45 am, I went back to my room to do some packing while Orca could get some shuteye, but I didn't get too much done and retired back to bed as well. Later in the morning after I woke up, Orca was teaching me some features of the Canon S3 (she has a Canon S2 which has almost identical features) when Tochi and MrMonk finally arrived back. After some deliberation, we would drive out to Chelan but camp for the night so that we could catch the ferry across Lake Chelan to get to Stehekin the next morning. And in the meantime, we ate some lunch at a nice pancake place and did some sightseeing around Kirkland where Tochi took this nice duck picture. The location of Orca's luggage however was still unknown, and we were about to go out and do some shopping in the afternoon with her when she got a call from the airport at around 4:30 pm saying her luggage had arrived! Another trip to the airport and about an hour later, we were all packed and ready to head out to Chelan. Our first stop along the way was at Leavenworth, where we could get some dinner and the geocachers could pick up a virtual cache from the Leavenworth web cam. I had to call and disturb TheDragOnfruitS during his BF2 session, but he managed to capture the picture for us :)
After obtaining the webcam picture, Team McGreggor sat down for some dinner at King Ludwig's Restaurant where we got King Ludwig's Family Style Platter for Four. After the filling dinner and some last hour photo shooting and geocaching, we headed off to find a national park to set up camp. Unfortuantely, this took waaaay longer than expected because a lot of the parks in the area either didn't have campgrounds or it was too late enter the park. And at around 1 am, we were starting to get worried whether we'd find a place at all to sleep tonight. But alas! There was an RV park nearby, and after an exchange of words by MrMonk and the guard at the RV park, we had found our campground for the night.
