James, Sharon, Rachel, and Jonathan are on furlough for a month and were driving from Connecticut to Tennessee.  So they stopped at our house for dinner last night and then stayed the night before leaving around 7:00 this morning.  It was so wonderful to see them, to hear about how Tanalian Bible Camp is doing, and to catch up.  We figured out that they’ve been at TBC for 19 years, which means that I’ve known them for over half my life.  I was really glad that they got to meet Nik and that Nik got to meet some people who I’ve talked a lot about.

I was Rachel’s counselor almost 3 years ago when she was just finished with 6th grade.  And now look at her!  She’s taller than me!

We had a wonderful time with them and had fun feeding them Greek food.  We even made loukomades, the delicious Greek fried, honey-soaked doughnut.  (One day I’ll post a tutorial for those!)

It was so nice to have some Alaska in my life here in Maryland!

(For those of my readers who are not familiar with Tanalian and the Walshes, the camp was started by my grandparents in western Alaska in the 1960s.  [fact check, Mom – 60s? 50s?]  [Fact check update from Mom – started in around ’61, originally as Illiamna Bible Camp, and Mom was a camper and a counselor too!] Anyway, it’s been around a long time and all of us kids went there for most of our lives, starting in 5th grade and going right on up through counseling as recently as 2006.  All of us kids, that is, except for Chris who only went to Tanalian once and mostly went to the other camp which shall not be named.  Traitor.  We even talked about that last night!    James and Sharon have been the camp directors there since July 1990.  You have to fly by small plane to get there and most of the kids who go to camp come from the villages of western Alaska.  My goldfish is named Dillingham because I had so many camp friends who came from Dillingham, one of those villages.  I had the privilege of taking my grandfather’s place on the camp’s board of directors for one year, before I moved to Maryland and had to resign.  All in all, it is a wonderful and incredibly gorgeous place.  If you go to the website, you can click on a webcam and get a really good sense for the amazing beauty that the camp is set in.  I Tanalian!)