When I wake up and walk into the living room, Darin is about to drive to Starbucks, his morning ritual. I’m happy to join him on that morning ritual and so a bit later we’re getting a coffee and drive back home. While the rest of the family leaves home to school and so, we sit down at the couch and have great conversations about life and God. Darin has some revolutionary ideas about believing, very different from what they teach in church and we find a lot of common ground. In church it’s often about doing all the right things, where as we agree that believing is all about love. We talk about a lot of things this morning, too much to write down now, but it’s an interesting conversation and time flies by.
In the afternoon we drive to town to pick up the kids from school and we also make a stop at an outdoors store where they sell everything you need when you go camping and also a lot of hunting gear. For someone from Europe it stays a bit strange to see all those guns in the store, but we also have fun shooting some play guns in a shooting gallery where you can shoot for points. I manage to get the same score as Darin does, so I think I’m qualified to live in the Midwest. We have lunch at the outdoors store and then drive back home.
The rest of the afternoon I hang out with the children. We play volleyball in the front yard and some video games at the Wii. It’s a nice relaxed day and I enjoy staying with this family. Another nice thing is that Darin used to be a chef in a restaurant, so we get very nice food here. Tonight we have pasta carbonara for dinner, delicious. We have fun times together and it’s also a good change from traveling all the time. Even though I would love to stay here longer, I think I’ll hit the road again tomorrow to visit some of the National Parks here. There is Mount Raineer and Olympic National Park, both must be beautiful nature to hike, so I’m curious.