Our final morning in Seattle we slept in as best we could then hung out around the house for a while. Peanut slept in a long time and Heath and I got laundry done and packed up a bunch of our stuff. Pumpkin took a long morning nap. Heath went to Walmart and reloaded our supplies of snacks and stuff. We gave Pumpkin a sink bath after a really bad diaper and she thought it was really funny. 
Around noon we really got going and headed to a park I think is called Tolwater. We go there every year because the beach there is loaded with sand dollars. 
I mean really loaded. All these dark colored disks are sand dollars piled together. 
On the way we broke into the snack bag and when we got there we headed out on the beach. 
The tide here makes a huge difference and we got lucky and it was way out. 
After exploring the beach a bunch and all of us accidentally getting our feet wet we headed into the woods behind the beach for a hike.
All the kids seemed to be getting complainy so we took a shortcut on the hike and then headed to Taco Time for a pile of tacos. Then we headed home and met up with Pops. The mail arrived and with it was my wallet from San Diego. Everything was there plus some free sand and dried up salt water. Pops got working on a dinner plan and I did a bit of laundry then laid down for a nap. I think I got a good 2 hours of sleep in. Then I got up and we grilled burgers and jalapeno poppers and kielbasa and had a great dinner. We got cleaned up put the last of our stuff in the van and said our goodbyes. 
Then we took off on the drive to Yellowstone. The drive from San Diego to San Francisco was Pumpkin’s roughest night and the drive from Seattle to Yellowstone was my roughest drive. The drive out started out really pretty and we had sunlight for the first few hours and we were all excited to be back on the road. I drove the first 4 hours then stopped for gas. I was feeling pretty good from my nap and Heath was getting tired so I took another shift. This also went ok, It was dark, the speed limit was 75 and the roads were really hilly and curvy. This was very stimulating but wore me down. I could not shake a Subaru behind me with his brights on and after another 4 hours I gave up.
I was still feeling ok at this point but thought I would play it safe and get some sleep. I pulled into a rest stop, hit the can and then woke up a zombie version of Heath to drive. I crashed out right away. I woke up a while later in another rest stop with Heath saying she could not do it anymore. I said ok sleep. I woke up an hour later and the sun was about to come up. I got in the driver seat and hit the road. It looked like we had only gone 67 miles and had around 4 hours left to go. Heath had been too sleepy and too out of it to get some coffee or anything and I was glad she played it safe too.
As the sun started to rise I put on headphones and cranked some more Johnny Cash. This was the second time I had gotten a sunrise shift at the wheel and got to watch a new landscape appear with a car full of sleepers. After the sun was up and Cash was used up I switched to Cross Canadian Ragweed and started following the windy Yellowstone river past a bunch of ranches and some really nice wilderness.
Fairly early that day we landed in a small touristy town at the north gate of Yellowstone and I pulled into some store that had a sign about breakfast and antique mining equipment decorating the outside. All I could think about was coffee.