Day Eight!

Knowing that we only had a 9-miler today, we didn’t start out from Clocktower Park in Dupont until 10 am. The air was cool and the sky was sunny as we navigated the lovely downtown streets, allowing for a good opportunity to take a photo of our shadows:

Leaving the downtown, we found ourselves winding our way through a sweet neighborhood of cute houses that seemed to go on forever. A couple of,e of people we stopped to give cookies to said that most of the people living there were military families working on the nearby base we had walked around yesterday. I was delighted to see this sign in one of the yards:

The neighborhood ended abruptly at a gate that only allowed a narrow passage for walkers to access a road leading to one of the only overpasses across the freeway. We knew that was the route to get us onto the only walkable road (the old Pacific highway) through the Nisqually reservation and into the town of Lacey.

Usually when we are walking along I keep an eye on the route directions so we don’t miss a crucial turn, but today I screwed up and didn’t notice that we had walked almost 2 miles past an important turnoff. Instead of almost being at our destination, we were actually almost 3 miles away, with folks waiting for us to show up. Yikes! We called dear Beckie, who arrived to take us back to within a half mile of the church, where we finished our walk as if nothing had happened. (Don’t tell anyone, okay?) We actually had ended up walking a bit more than what we’d planned for the day…

Upon our arrival, we were greeted warmly by folks at the Nisqually Chapel of the LDS church (Mormons), as well as the huge surprise of finding my dear friend Linda and her husband Jeff waiting to see see me! They had come all the way from Kansas City! (Linda and I had been castmates for a year in Up With People, a singing group that performed in Europe, Africa and the U.S. in 1974-5.)

The afternoon included a blessing, delicious meal, and the playing of an original song arranged by our dear friend Lance with words written (originally as a poem) by none other than Bob!

We are, once again, so grateful to have experienced being with yet another faith community that slipped on our t-shirts and embraced our simple, powerful message.