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Family

Camp 4 Star Photo Day

For the last ~50 years, Camp 4 Star has been operating in our area and kids from all our area churches (and their friends) have been attending. Elijah has been going for four years now and Tim and Chelsea have been pouring their hearts and souls into running it. We really appreciate all their work! The photos and videos that we get from camp are already wondering, but I thought it would be fun to spend a day there with all my camera gear. The stakes would be low and I would certainly learn some stuff. I suggested that to Tim about seven years ago and I finally got around to doing it this year.

It was really neat to get to spend a full day at camp. We saw the whole schedule play out in person instead of just on a piece of paper. The choreography of the day was impressive! There’s so much planning and preparation that goes into it, and it all worked so smoothly.

I don’t know if I got anything that camp will end up actually using, but here are the shots I got:

And I also took a bunch of video:

So what did I learn?

  • If I’m going to make a video like this, I think I think I would do more of a promo style video where I interview people and use their quotes as the main soundtrack of the video.
  • I was nervous about keeping enough battery power throughout the day, but I carried a power bank in my pocket and ran a USB cable from that to my camera. I never had a problem and I could have gone multiple days like that.
  • I’ve never used this feature before but my tripod can also function as a monopod. One of the legs screws off and then the head can attach to that. While I felt a little silly using it, it was immensely useful. I would have had a difficult time getting through the day without it, specially when I was using my giant 70-200mm lens. Not only did it remove the weight when I was standing still, but it kept the camera so much more solid than hand holding it. I was able to get good pictures and video even at full zoom.
  • If I did it again, I would bring multiple tripod adapters so that I could quickly switch lenses without moving the adapter round. When I use the big lens, the adapter goes on the lens and when I use the smaller lens, the adapter goes on the camera.
  • I would also set up some secondary cameras (like a GoPro or two) to catch more continuous action at the beach or at campfire. I did have an audio recorder set up at campfire and that was fantastic, but I wish I had also done that with video.

All in all, it was a great day, and we got some fun memories out of it!

benmartens August 20, 2026 Family, Outdoors, Photography No Comments

Deception Pass Camping

Every year we try to go camping with Tyla’s family. I’m pretty sure we’ve done it every year since 2008! This year we went to an old favorite: Deception Pass State Park. It’s a very busy place and we had to book right when the reservations opened up 9 months earlier, but this time we stayed on the east side of the park in the Quarry Pond campground. That seemed a bit more laid back and we could still access all the various parts of the park.

Don always brings his trailer and we congregate there for all the meals, but I was able to book a cabin that was right next to their site. When you go camping in June around here, there’s a decent chance that it will be cold and rainy so the cabin is nice to have. Thankfully we had almost perfect weather with temps around 70 and clear skies.

We watched beautiful sunsets every night down at the beach, walked across the bridge, explored the tide pools in the north part of the park, and hiked around the Quarry Pond side of the park. A huge thanks to Don, Logan, and Megan for getting the camper ready for this one weekend trip and then storing it again!

As I was watching the sunset one night, I wondered where it was rising. Stop and think about that for a moment. You’re sitting near Seattle in June watching the sun going down over the Pacific. Where is it rising? The answer surprised me: Paris!

They all left one day before us because of some family stuff, but we enjoyed our time with them and also the time with just the three of us.

benmartens July 13, 2026 Family, Outdoors

Confirmation

Elijah was recently confirmed at church. Most people probably don’t know what that means, and those that do probably have differing definitions. My quick explanation of it has been that for the last two years, Elijah has been taking extra classes at church with Pastor and this is his graduation ceremony which is also part of the church service. I think that’s a decent surface level explanation, but I wanted to go a bit deeper here.

First of all, let’s talk about what it is not. Confirmation is not a sacrament, nor is it anything that is commanded in the Bible. It doesn’t save you. You’re not receiving Christ. While it is the point at which you start taking communion, it’s not the same as “first communion” in other churches. You don’t need to do this to get to have faith or get to heaven.

Instead, it’s a church practice where someone (usually towards the end of middle school) publicly affirms their faith. They are acknowledging that they have been taught what the Christian faith is and they are saying they believe that it is true. It’s somewhat similar to a wedding vow renewal ceremony. A wedding vow renewal doesn’t create marriage. The couple was already married, but it is still meaningful and publicly reaffirms what is already true. Somewhat similarly, confirmation does not create salvation. It publicly reaffirms the faith already given by the Holy Spirit through the gospel.

Confirmation class is a structured way to instruct people about what the Bible teaches. Various churches in our national church body handle it slightly differently, but our church does Bible History class in 6th grade, Catechism class in 7th grade, and then life application in 8th grade. The confirmation ceremony happens between 7th and 8th grade. So my quick “graduation” explanation is not at all what we want to happen. Your Christian training lasts your whole life and even the classes continue on next year as they talk about how to apply their faith in their lives.

We were happy that both Tyla’s family and my parents could be there to celebrate along with friends from church. It was a special day in his life, and we pray that it’s just a solid start to his life of faith.

P.S. I’m always happy to talk more about this if you have questions, or you can check out this quick summary of what the Bible teaches: The Great Exchange – WAJ. The rest of that site is great as well.

benmartens June 29, 2026 Family

Olympic Peninsula Road Trip

I don’t know how this started, but our family is trying to visit every county in Washington state. With our impending move next summer, we are trying to finish off the remaining counties soon. I divided them up into two trips, the first of which was an Olympic Peninsula tour. It was about 800 miles so we chopped it up into three days and did it over Memorial Day weekend.

Before we started, I added two doses of nerd to the trip:

  1. I had GitHub Copilot create a nicely formatted HTML page with our itinerary on it and then I shared it with Tyla and Elijah so they could look at it during the trip. It had all our stops on it along with links to menus at restaurants. It also included the nice header image that you see in this post.
  2. I used GitHub Copilot to build an app that lets me generate custom podcast. First it asks me how long I want the podcast to be. Then it researches a bunch of material about the topic and generates a two-speaker script. Then it renders that script into audio using my Azure subscription. Finally, it generates a podcast XML feed and uploads it all to my webserver. That gives us custom podcasts based on specific things that we’re going to see on our trip. It’s not as good as real humans but it’s fun to learn more about specific things we’re seeing.

Saturday

On Saturday, we left early to get in line for the Edmonds to Kingston ferry. We knew it would be very busy (and it was) but we got on comfortably to our target sailing. It’s a pretty quick ride across the Sound and then we made our way west to US 101. Our first stop was Forks, WA for lunch, but since we were doing good on time, I lengthened the trip a bit by taking SR 112 which follows much closer to the water. That road was wild! It had clearly been washed out in many different places and hastily repaired. The speed limit was slow but going any faster would probably destroy your vehicle anyway.

We ended up in Forks for lunch and I was happy to see that a lot of the Twilight-themed stuff had disappeared. There was still plenty of vampire tourism going on though. We charged the car and had lunch ate at the Longhouse Cafe. It’s an authentic Native American restaurant and everything they serve comes with or on Indian frybread. Delicious!

After that we continued on to our stop at the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center in Olympic National Park. This is where we hit my big mistake in the itinerary. Visiting a national park on Memorial Day weekend? Duh. Huge line. We waited close to two hours to get through the entrance station, but thankfully we were in the Tesla so we weren’t stopping and starting our cars every few minutes like everyone else in line. We stamped Elijah’s National Park passport book at the Visitor Center and the rangers were very impressed with our idea to put a family photo next to each stamp. We hiked a few short trails but we didn’t stay long. Olympic National Park is a tough one to visit. It’s beautiful but it’s a huge area and each entrance is very far apart. So even though we’ve been to multiple parts of it, they’ve all been for short visits where we just see glimpses of the overall park.

From there we continued our trek down to Aberdeen, WA for our first hotel stay and we had dinner at Billy’s Bar & Grill which was also a winner.

Sunday

On Sunday, our first stop was the Historic Grays River Covered Bridge. It was built in the early 1900s and you can still drive your car across it today. I’ve never seen a covered bridge before so I was glad that there was basically no one around and we could spend our time looking at it.

From there we headed to Hood River by way of Jimmy John’s for lunch. For this stretch, we hopped back on the interstate and drove through Oregon. At Hood River we stopped for a round of disc golf and then had ice cream while watching the wind surfers. Then we took the toll bridge across the Columbia back into Washington to collect a few more counties on our way to Yakima.

We had perfect weather both Saturday and Sunday which gave us great views!

Monday

Our last day of the trip was just a ~2.5 hour drive back home, but since it was the Monday of Memorial Day weekend, we didn’t want to delay our start. We shot through Snoqualmie Pass before it clogged up and we were back home before lunch.

Summary

All in all it was just under 800 miles. A silly road trip like this would have been harder to justify at $6/gallon for gas, but the whole trip only cost us $87 in electricity. We stayed both nights in Best Western Plus’s (as usual) and got some discounts there from the rewards we’ve built up. Eating out was a big slice of the total cost and we could have cut that down by packing lunches like normal, but part of the fun was the food along the way.

Now we have one more trip planned to hit the remaining counties in southeast Washington.

benmartens June 11, 2026 Family, Travel

High School Search

As I mentioned earlier, we’re planning a move to Minnesota in the summer of 2027. During Elijah’s spring break, we flew out there as a family to visit all three of the high schools that our national church body runs: West, St. Croix, and Minnesota Valley.

It felt a bit odd to be exploring all three of those schools. We knew ahead of time that they were all great and we didn’t want to give the impression that we were shopping them against each other, but it was a big help to see them all and also to drive around the three areas. They have distinct personalities and ministries. Thankfully we left thinking we could see how attending each one of them would be great, and it also got Elijah even more excited about the move.

Before we visited Minnesota Valley, we stopped in for chapel and lunch at Martin Luther College. For being a “random”, tiny college 1500 miles away from us, it’s amazing how welcome we feel when we step on campus. As soon as we got out of the car, one of the staff members saw us and waved, and when we went into the cafe, we were mobbed (in a great way) by so many people welcoming us and giving us hugs. I was especially thankful to the students that got up to come over and say hi to Elijah. It makes such a huge impression on him.

We got a lot of practice explaining our move. I’ve learned to start with “I can do my job from anywhere” and “We’ve lived in this area before”. That gets through most of the initial questions. There was also confusion at MLC because some people knew Tyla and I were coming back the following Friday for a President’s Advisory Council meeting. We thought a lot about combining the trips, but it was simpler to split them up and to do it when Elijah was on break.

That trip the following week did go smoothly as well. We are so thankful to have the opportunity to give feedback on challenges the school is facing and plans for the future. The administration is full of amazing people who put everything they have into making it the best possible training school for every pastor, teacher, and staff minister in our church body. I also got to have a good chat with their IT team to learn how they are adopting AI in their software development process.

I’m sure there will be many more trips in our future as we zero in on a specific place to live, but this was a big checkbox for us!

benmartens May 11, 2026 Family

Big News

Did you have a nice break for Christmas and New Years? Are you settled back in yet? Ok good, because we have big news: we are moving to Minnesota. (See? That title wasn’t click-bait!) It won’t happen right away though. We are planning this for the summer of 2027.

I realize that it’s going to be difficult for anyone else to understand the full picture of why we’re doing this, and honestly, that’s ok. We’re confident that this is a good move for our family. Some of the reasons are private of course, but here are some of the big ones:

  • A major, unique factor for our family is that I can work from anywhere. So with that in mind, consider it from the perspective of “If I can live anywhere in the country, why am I living in a busy suburb of Seattle?” I will need to get approval to work fully remote and talk to HR about the compensation changes that will come with moving to an area with a lower cost of living, but I’m hopeful that will all go smoothly. While there is an office in the Minneapolis area, I don’t expect I’d ever need to go there since nobody else on my team lives there.
  • In the summer of 2027, Elijah will be done with 8th grade. We’ve spent a lot of time researching high schools around here.
    • Our national church body operates a great high school down in the Tacoma area. We’d love to send Elijah there, but it would mean 5+ hours of commuting every day. If we moved closer, I’d still be within the radius where I’m required to commute to work at least 3 days a week starting in February so that’s unattractive too.
    • We’ve been through (literally) every Christian private school in the area and they were all rejected for adding/subtracting from the Bible. The current school we attend isn’t perfect either but it was close enough that we were comfortable working with Elijah as he went through it, but we couldn’t even find that situation for high schools.
    • We looked at non-religious private schools and mainly rejected those for cost. It’s not uncommon to find tuition prices north of $40,000/year.
    • Our public high school is very good, and this was our top choice if we didn’t move.
  • There are three great high schools in Minnesota that are affiliated with our national church body: West, St. Croix, and Minnesota Valley. We’ll be exploring those options more to figure out exactly where we want to land. Elijah has also lightly expressed interest in attending Martin Luther College so this will put him in touch with other high school kids thinking about that career path and also put us closer to the college if he does go there. If he chooses something else, there are plenty of other good schools to pick from (or we could always move again.)
  • In the big scheme of things, I don’t think we’d be called homesteaders, but we certainly want more land with room to have a big garden, an outbuilding or two, and maybe some animals. We currently own 1/6th of an acre and the bare land is valued at $700,000. That’s something like $4.2 million/acre if you could even find an acre of land to buy. We’ve always talked about moving further away from Seattle and Bellevue to spread out a little.
  • Tyla and I both grew up in the Midwest and furthermore, Tyla grew up southeast of Minneapolis. We feel at home in wide open spaces and empty two-lane roads. Contrast that with the view from our back yard where we can see 16 houses and endless traffic we sit in at all hours of the day on any day of the week. We are generally quick to say we love this area, but those feelings don’t always align with the current reality. The population has exploded in the last 20 years. That’s great for our property value, but bad for our comfort level.

There are definitely things we’ll miss around here. We have friends and family close by and there are few places in the country more beautiful than this area. The temperatures are mild, and our summers are incredible. We’re moving to a flat land of snowy winters, sweaty summers, and bugs. But, as cheesy as it sounds, home is wherever the three of us are. I’m hopeful that we’ll grow even closer together during this experience as we tackle this challenge together. And it’s also comforting knowing that wherever we land, there will be a church home waiting for us.

Why are we announcing this now? In a blog post? We don’t know how to do this. This has been something we’ve been praying about for months. We decided we would go through Christmas and New Years like normal and then tell everyone at once so there were no secrets or groups of people with mismatched information. We wanted to get the news out so that we can start sharing this part of our lives.

There are many details left to discover over the coming year and a half. The first big step will be a trip to visit all three of those potential high schools. The hope is that all three feel like a good fit for different reasons, but we’ll take our learnings from that and see what real estate looks like. I can already tell you that when I property search around those areas, I have my search set to “No HOA” and “> 2 acres” and that turns up a lot of options that seem to fit the style we are looking for. We’ll see how those dreams play out.

I imagine that a lot of friends and family reading this will have a lot of questions. We’re happy to chat about it but please know that a lot of the answers will be “I don’t know yet.” We feel like this is the right move, but there are a lot of specifics to work out.

benmartens January 6, 2026 Family

2025 Year In Review

Another year has come and gone. There are a lot of good memories shared below, but on a more global scale, I think when I look back at 2025 it will be the year of AI. Sure ChatGPT has been around for three years now, but this year AI was a force multiplier in pretty much every aspect of my life. Every few months feels like another level up and every step we take forward is bigger and bigger. While there are certainly challenges and concerns with using it, it’s impossible to ignore the positive impact it has had not just at work, but at home and at church too.

Zooming in from that global view, we had a lot of trips around the country. There was our annual trip to Leavenworth with Tyla’s family in January, visiting MLC with Elijah, a trip to eastern WA as we crossed off more counties, camping with Tyla’s family at Ike Kinswa State Park, my solo trip to the synod convention in New Ulm, a summer week in Indiana, our family road trip to Yellowstone, another trip to MLC, and a few days in Mazama with my parents. Looking back at that list, maybe this is actually the year of New Ulm, MN! I was there three times this year. It’s a lot of travel to that specific small town, but Tyla and I are both really thankful to be part of those meetings at Martin Luther College.

We had quite a few fun day trips too. There was a Boeing Factory tour, seeing the Piano Guys in concert, riding bike/train things, our Leavenworth chocolate tour, and seeing another professional disc golf tournament.

Church continues to occupy a lot of time on my calendar and space in my head. We spun up a new leadership structure last year that creates teams to handle a lot of the work that we used to handle on council. That has certainly helped and is going well, but somehow it seems like the work for council is still a very long list. Thankfully we are seeing a lot of growth and energy while record numbers of visitors are walking through the doors.

I’m thankful to have spent another year working from home. That will be changing next year when they bring us back to the office in February, but for now it’s nice to have lunch with Tyla while also not spending 1.5 hours in traffic every day. The return-to-work next year will be a big change for all of us, but I’m still thankful to have this job so I’m willing to make that commute even if I don’t know where that time will come from. It’s wonderful to have a supportive family that is willing to roll with the changes.

Woodworking remained near the top of my favorite hobbies even though the list of completed wood working projects feels very short this year. I spent a huge portion of the year playing with different ways to make coasters. I finally landed on a fairly repeatable process and I made a bunch of MLC coasters. I enjoyed being able to refine my approach and get better each time, but eventually I had to stop because it felt like I was just troubleshooting little issues and it wasn’t fun anymore. I also built a new desk top for my standing desk, finished a nightstand for Tyla, and built us our own nativity set. More recently I have been experimenting with machine a plastic called HDPE. It’s like milk jug plastic, but it has white material sandwiched between two layers of color so depending on how far down you cut, you reveal different colors. I started with an American flag in the shape of the United States and then also made an MLC logo and an eagle sign.

If I look at how much time I spend doing various hobbies, piano would probably be at the top by quite a big stretch. I don’t think of it as a hobby because I’m usually practicing for an upcoming church service, but even when I have a break in the church piano schedule, I still like to play every day. I like to record every song that I learn in MIDI and then render out a nice audio version. Sometimes I do video too and, in those cases, I throw them up on YouTube.

2025 was “just another year” without any grand events, but that’s something to be thankful for too.

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

benmartens December 31, 2025 Commentary, Family

Railriding

Looking back through my 2025 posts in preparation for my “year in review” post, I realized that I never wrote about our rail riding trip in August!

For Tyla’s birthday adventure, we checked out Vance Creek Railriders. They have a stretch of tracks and custom built pedal powered train carts. Each cart can hold up to four people and you better be ready to pedal because it’s a workout!

The trip away from the home base goes pretty quickly because there are large stretches that are slightly downhill. We probably got going ~20-25 mph at points, but of course, all that fun downhill was just future work for us.

At the turnaround point, they had a special contraption for flipping the carts around while we had the option of visiting the port-a-potty.

Coming back was significantly harder, and it was made worse by the group towards the front that seemed to take pedaling as an optional part of the trip. It sort of was optional because the cart in the back had a small engine on it, but there was no way it could push the dozen or so carts up the hills so we all still had to pedal.

I don’t think any of us are itching to do this every weekend, but it was definitely a fun experience that we’re all glad we tried.

benmartens December 18, 2025 Family, Travel