The Matt Faus Blog

Well, I’ve been in Seattle for the past couple of months and my brother, Ben, was coming up here with the high school choir, so my parents and my other brother, Andrew, also decided to spend the weekend up here! Everyone arrived Saturday and the fun began!
Saturday, I cooked some dinner and we laid out the gameplan. Sunday we went to Mars Hill Church to catch the 9am service. This is an amazing church, by the way. I have been here a couple times since I’ve been in Seattle and the biggest feeling I get upon leaving is that everyone there is so honest, real, and well, human. It’s amazing because the things we talk about are directly applicable to everyday life and the speakers are incredibly down-to-earth and understanding. If you’re ever in Seattle you should definitely check out this church. For lunch we met up with my Aunt Verla and Sue at a place called The Dish. They had some really good breakfast food, especially the omelets. After this we headed down to Lakewood to pay a visit to the FBCC High School choir and listen to Ben sing a few songs in a concert for the Lakewood Baptist Church. After the concert, we stole Ben away and had a nice family dinner in downtown Seattle. We ate at a place called The Pike – the pizza was really good. After this we just walked around downtown and along the bay and soaked in the scenery.

Monday we went to Bainbridge after having lunch with Patrick at Ivar’s. Andrew got the seagulls to eat his leftover French fries from his hands and then we hopped on the ferry! Bainbridge was gearing up for the Fourth of July festivities and we got some awesome hand-made ice cream before heading back to the homeland. At this point Andrew and I headed off to the Mariner’s game and my parents went on a dinner train. The Mariner’s game was fun as far as baseball games go, but I can’t speak for the dinner train. (The food looks good in the pictures).

Now, Tuesday was quite a day. Boarding a tour bus at 7am, we didn’t get back until around 6:45pm – a full 12 hours! Now, what were we doing on this crazy twelve hour expedition, you ask? Why, trekking across the face of the world-renowned Mount Rainier, of course! The tour bus took us up to a region of the mountain called Paradise and we got to see several amazing pieces of scenery along the way. The glaciers at the top of the mountain were in full melt so the waterfalls were swelling with majesty. With over fourteen thousand feet of altitude, the clouds were even clipping the top of the mountain, creating a subtle halo effect. It was a lot of fun to get outdoors and explore such a wondrous creation. While hiking through some of the forests of this sleeping volcano, it was incredible to see some of the trees that are still living after nearly 1,000 years. Could you imagine living for nearly 1,000 years? It’s unfathomable how the immense complexities of nature all seem to work themselves out to such beauty and elegance. Needless to say, my dad and I took a lot of cool pictures. He loved playing around with his new Sony Cybershot DSC-H2, and I got some pretty good pictures, too. After having lunch in the shadow of the colossus we did a little more riding around until we finally got to a small patch of snow where we had an Independence Day snowball fight, which is something that you’ll never get to do in Texas! We didn’t have a whole lot of time to play in the snow because people were waiting to get home, but it was fun nevertheless! My dad caught some pretty cool shots of it, one of which are included below, enjoy! On the ride home from the mountain we passed through an Indian reservation, one of the only places in Washington where you can buy fireworks and boy was it crowded! After getting back to town we hung out a little in my apartment, checked e-mail, downloaded pics, and then we were off to watch the fireworks over Puget Sound! We were kind of late in leaving so we didn’t have a great spot to see them, but it was a pretty good show. It’s really too bad we didn’t have our boat out there as watching the fireworks from a boat would have been incredible! They lit up the whole sky and their reflection on the water was really something else.

It was really cool to see my family this weekend and I think I got a much-needed break from work, haha! As always, don’t forget to check out all the pictures we took over the weekend!