For the last three years or so of our life the C word has been Cruising. We have lived, breathed, and completely wrapped our life around cruising. Unfortunately now that C word has changed to Cancer, at least for the foreseeable future. The lump in Bill's leg was biopsied and came back as melanoma. It's not what we expected and we are very angry and scared about it. Since that diagnosis Bill has had a number of other significant tests and the news has not been that positive. It seems that the melanoma has spread, but only to one spot on his lung. We are taking that as good news for now and hoping that the other tests he will have in the following weeks confirm that it is good news. We know we have some hard months ahead of us but we are hoping that ultimately our C word will change back to Cruising and we can continue where we left off.

In the meantime though we took this opportunity to fly to Seattle to visit our grandchildren who live there. The oldest, Aaron, has been in training as an airman in the Air Force and is about to transfer to his first duty station in Okinawa, Japan. It will be quite a while until the three kids are all together again. He was only home in Seattle for two weeks. We are spending a long weekend there with them. When they were younger we took them backpacking on Mount Rainier every summer. This time Aaron took all of us hiking there, determined to summit one of the peaks on the mountain. Bill wasn't so sure we were actually going to be able to do that but we did! We summitted Plummer Peak on the south side of the mountain in the Tatoosh range. It was three and a half miles and a 1,300 foot climb. The elevation at the top was 6,340 feet. It was a great hike and brought back a lot of memories for me and Bill. The picture above is Bill with the kids on the top of the peak. We had a fantastic day!

We aren't sure what happens next. The tests we have scheduled for this week should give more answers and we are seeing an Oncologist from Johns Hopkins who we hope will be more aggressive than the doctor we have already met in our local hospital. We will update the blog when we have more information.