We started organizing our GregJennandKids.com website with some of the experiences of our year on the road when we gathered some footage from the Poop Tour in Arizona with our friends Debbie and Miguel.  One of our first web pages was about water treatment plants from video footage captures and we felt like we should send Sam a thank you.

After the Poop Tour, our guide Sam gave us some treats.

Tasty.

You know where we’re going with this, don’t you?

To the water treatment plant baby!  It’s not real, but maybe it is.  HeHe.

After a good poo, we would often visit downtown Seattle and ride the Pirate Ship.  This is the best ride in the world and throughout our travels we rode other pirate ships, but nothing compares to the one in Seattle.

This Pirate Ship ride is in the park under the Space Needle ~ a must see in Seattle. Not so much a must go to as it is like $15 EACH to just the observation tower and visibility is decent only like an average of 46 days a year… and you definitely pay through the butt to eat here (but it is great food). Greg took Jenn on her birthday with our friends Amy and Duane to eat here when he decided to blow the wad on the Limo and week of flowers for Jenn ~ Jenn’s b-days are really important (March 30 for those in the need to know). We have also taken out of town guests here and dined with a rotating view of the city, or clouds depending on the day.

Also at the base of the Space Needle is the relatively new Experience Music Project (EMP) built by Paul Allen of Microsoft. We ended up at the EMP several times and would enjoy the lobby because it to is freaky expensive (5x anything is limiting). It is a wicked cool museum dedicated to teaching and furthering music education.  Since it cost a billion dollars to go, we just took photos outside.

Back in Issaquah, we were thrilled to see our shot glass collection out of storage.  Greg’s granddad started this collection years ago and we ended up with it and have since added to it ~ over 100 and growing. We also get friends to bring us shot glasses from their travels.

The summer was great in Issaquah, we spent it with a few hundred friends and a ladder.

With a leak…

BIG leak.

Hannah, Savannah, and Sunny no longer on fire.

Since we lived right next to the skate park we always had kids dropping by to hang out.  We didn’t even know these kids, but they sure hung out with us a lot.

And they put 22’s, hoppin’ hydraulics, and a giant subwoofer in the fire-truck to get it bouncing to da beatz.

So we’re hangin out in our little house and trying to put a few things together for work.  We had a whiteboard in the living room for brain storming and would add work ideas as fast as we’d erase them. We were working really hard at coming up with something that would be more of a Family business where we could work together.  After trying the Mobile Marketing thing, we felt frustrated at the lack of businesses we could do together, and the fact that the marketing folks weren’t even calling us back sucked to.  After all, we left a great life to change what Family meant to us and we know we have to work.  We just wanted to find something and work.  This was far from vacation at this point.

But nobody should work 24×7 ~ we kept our fun going. We were invited to an H.O. Water Sports employee party by our neighbors Mike and Shaun.  We all got to spend the afternoon at the H.O. Estate.  This lake was specially engineered by Herb O’Brien (H.O.), water Sports mogul, to make waves crash on the shore rather than have them roll back into the water.  Makes for some easy skiing and wake boarding.

Herb himself is in the boat getting ready to take another crew out on the water.  See what we’re talking about ~ mixing Family and business.

Herb was out on the water all day pulling employees and their kids behind the boat.  A real Family guy and Family business.  It was very cool to see him do this.  He hardly stays on land.

Herb’s place was really great ~ he lived in a relatively modest home and had other cabins and buildings on the site for visitors and storage.

There is also private hookups for Herb’s friends with RV’s.  We got to meet Herb’s wife and she invited us to park the RV up here anytime.

We spent most of our time running around through the property.  This place was like something out of a movie and was so awesome.  You could walk through the place and lose yourself here. We got to do it care free. No maintenance, taxes, employees, repairs…

Our new young lover friends tried to lose us and steal some time for themselves.  The kids stalked them endlessly trying to catch a glimpse of them making out.  Okay, we all did.

Bill Gates tried to buy this land from Herb before he went to jail and offered him whatever he wanted for it.  Herb refused because he knew what he had, ultimate privacy on some of the most beautiful land in Redmond.  Also when the world’s richest man offers you whatever you want, you know you got something good.

This place was nothing but beautiful rolling green hills and massive evergreen trees.  There was lots of places to go to a get a great view and relax.  That’s Shannon manhandling Sunny.

Austin loves it here and Kesley pretended to know how to ski.

The new young lovers ~ Mike and Shannon, they did make out and we caught ’em, but not on camera.

We did catch them performing a primal ritual showing who wears the pants in the Family.  Shannon does.

See.

Joe Dirt lost her front tooth on Herb’s land and we were never able to find it, so we took some gross photos.

But she cleans up nicely and her tooth is probably still on Herb’s land somewhere.

Back in Issaquah, we would spend Friday nights at the last Triple X hamburger joint left in the country. Perhaps this was a sign of barenaked things to come?!?

Timon had to wait outside and let everyone know how disappointed and lonely he was.

A local Issaquah legend and our friend Mr. Dancing Pants.  This was a locally famous guy that worked at most of the local businesses while we lived here.  He is a young guy that was pretty normal without headphones, but once he puts them on he busts out some funky moves all over the city.  It was not uncommon to be driving around town and see him dancing in the streets.  He only listened to the Monkee’s and got national media attention for performing like this for no reason other than the pleasure that music brings.

When you honk at him, he gives you a one on one performance and wants nothing in return although he seems to appreciate funny, confused looks, and smiles with a wave.

So after feeling frustrated with the whole Family business thing, we just couldn’t settle yet.  We found someone to take our six month lease after only six weeks in and packed up the RV, put stuff back into storage and decided to meet the Nodlands in Yellowstone.

We had borrowed some stuff to help furnish the house in Issaquah from a friend of a friend kind of thing.  Our friend hooked us up with some repo guy who had extra stuff laying around.  His property was filled with cars and motorcycles as well as some cool driftwood projects he was working on.  The guy told us we could use the stuff we borrowed as long as we returned it.  Greg and Van first went out there to see what he had.  He lived way the heck out in the woods and when Greg got back he told Jenn this guy was a little creepy (lesson in paying attention to your intuition).  We later returned to his house to pick up the stuff we wanted to use.  We used it while we lived in Issaquah and when it came time to return the stuff, we were happy to drive it out to his place.  We set up a day and time that we would come out to his house and drop off the stuff.  The day came for us to go out there so we made phone calls and left messages on his answering machine to let him know we were coming.  Didn’t hear back from him.  This isn’t the kind of guy that you just drop in on either.  Leather chaps.  Big dogs.  Remote house.  Think we would have put all this together when we first met him.  Well, all day long we waited to hear from him and made several more calls and left several messages saying we needed to ‘drop off his stuff cause we’re leaving town‘.   Finally we decided to just drive the stuff out there and leave it on his patio.  The young lovers, Shannon and Mike agreed to help us by letting us load up their truck with the TV and such.  By now it was late at night and dark and we were ready to get on the road first thing in the morning.  Jenn, Shannon, and the kids followed Mike and Greg who were in the truck out to his land.  You have to go down several dirt roads in the forest to get out there and finally we came over the hill leading to his place only to drive right into a HUGE drug bust.  Tons of cops and trucks, the street and house is blocked off and here we are.  The cops came running over to the truck not knowing who we were.  They surrounded both of our vehicles and questioned who we are and what we were doing out here.  Greg explained how we borrowed ‘the stuff‘ they had been hearing about all day on the answering machine and didn’t know the guy well at all.  At this point they recognized us as the perp that wanted to ‘drop off the stuff to get out of town‘ from all the messages we left that day and not so kindly asked us to get out of the vehicle and spread ’em… They were very interested in seeing the stuff in the back of the truck under a blanket. Right about here is where Mike, the young lover, started with all his legal mumbo jumbo on searching peoples cars.  You see, Mike was studying criminal law or something like that and decided to be a big boy at this time.  We told him to shut up and showed the officers the stuff in the back of the truck.  They then looked long and hard at the VW with Jenn, Shannon, and the kids in it and realized we had nothing to do with the giant Meth Lab bust at all.  We were just a sweet Family and young lovers that were just returning some furniture.  They told us that we needed to leave right there and then without returning the stuff, so we hauled.  Mike now owns the stuff and we never saw or heard from that guy again. Our friend of the friend told us later that the guy had another guy that was living in a trailer in his woods cooking meth and the repo guy had no idea and had nothing to do with it and blah, blah, blah… We’re going with intuition next time.

We talked to Matt who owned the apartment about leaving early on the lease and he was cool with it.  We told him that we got some great friends who were looking for a place that wanted to take over our lease and he actually just released us from it and signed a new one with them.  He is also ten feet tall and its unlikely we could’ve outrun him. So glad he was cool.

Greg, Jenn, Shauna, Austin, Leland, Kesley, and Sunny standing in front of the house we left.  Shauna and Leland took over the lease and probably have twenty of their friends living there and we took off in the RV.

When we left we felt so frustrated with things and just wanted to work and work hard at something we believed in.  We hated leaving Issaquah and everyone but we just needed to find whatever we were looking for. Why is it so hard to do something like this?  Why has it become so unheard of to work together?  Why do we have to be so different?  FCUK. If we could just have a family business like French Connection United Kingdom. FCUK. Too bad, it’s just how we are feeling.