In honor of said holidays, the blog will be on hiatus until further notice. If you miss me so much, you can leave some comments. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the New Year.
vacation
Seattle Part Three – Seattle Propper
As soon as the work was done (great conference by the way, learned a *ton*) we were off to downtown Seattle to hit up the major attractions. We hit up Seattle Center and, though we didn’t actually go up in the Space Needle, we got a good look at it. We did check out the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum.
The museums were okay, but nothing special. Granted we couldn’t spend as much time there as I would have liked, since Evie was getting restless, but after we left, Evie managed to get us to buy some tickets to the carnival rides outside. It quickly became apparent that all of us would have enjoyed the day more if we had taken the money for the museum and just let Evie blow it on the rides. Add in a trip to the children’s museum and I have to say that Seattle Center has Navy Pier beat for fun by at least a factor of 10.
We ate possibly the best meal of the trip at a creperie of all places, 611 Supreme. My crepe was better than I imagined a crepe could be, they let us just get a side of shrimp for Evie at the “extra topping” price, and the toasted almond bread with goat cheese and olives was awesome. Don’t even get me started on “Le Chocolat”, our desert crepe.
The next day we hit up the aquarium and Pike Place Market before eventually relaxing with some friends at the corner of Love & Loss in the Olympic Sculpture Park. The aquarium was kind of small, but we still had fun. I liked the giant octopus (you can just see the evil in his eye) and Evie liked sitting in the jellyfish ring: “There’s jellyfish under my bottom!” Pike Place was pretty much exactly as I expected, but still well worth the trip. We saw the requisite people throwing (and catching) fish and the original Starbucks (can you imagine, at one point it was the only Starbucks in the world?) as well as some unexpected things like cheese making, lots of weddings, and a cat wearing a sweater. I also saw an unrelated dog riding in a bike basket, wearing a hat. The sculpture park was actually pretty cool and even if you’re not into modern sculpture, the view was breathtaking.
Finally we were off for home, with a short layover in “Kansas Silly” (Evie’s words, not mine) we made it all the way back to Chicago in time for bed.
Overall, my impression of Seattle was very favorable. It is pretty small for a big city. I am used to looking at a Chicago map and the scale of the Seattle map kept throwing me off. Despite that, there is so much to do there, and the city is so hip, that it feels much bigger. The views of the ocean and mountains were spectacular, although, growing up in the Midwest, it doesn’t take much landscape-wise to impress me. In Indiana we were impressed with just a hill. The people of Seattle have a very distinct sense of style, unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else. I got the impression that a lot of people were trying a little too hard…there were no half measures. If you were punk, you were punk. At home I’ll see maybe one person a week that I think, “whoa, did you see that guy?” or “what the heck was she wearing?” and in Seattle I would think that easily once per block. One major downside is the city is just crawling with homeless people. On the other hand, though there were a lot more there then in Chicago, they didn’t harass me for money the way the ones here do.
One last tale to report, our downtown hotel had a sign stating that the pool was closed due to “unfortunate circumstances”. That means dead body, right? Can that mean anything else?
Seattle Part Two – Work Interrupts
The second part of the trip was a little less interesting because I had to attend to what I was really in Seattle for; work. Let me start by saying that Microsoft is a crazy, crazy huge confusing place. It is as big or bigger than any university you have been too, complete with tons of young people walking and biking all over the place. I was not prepared for the size of it all.
Since I had to attend a training / conference, Sara and Evie took Seattle and the surrounding area by storm. Without poor old dad, they hit up the zoo where Evie got to feed a giraffe (seriously, how did they manage to get “zoo.org”, were they like the first zoo with a website?), the Pacific Science Center, a children’s museum and a full tea service. The coolest part was that our existing Chicago zoo and museum memberships got them into the first two completely scott free.
We also managed to hit up our first really good meal of the trip at Pomegranate in Redmond. Not only did everybody get something that was delicious, they had a really cool kids meal that seemed very fancy, but was really things like mac and cheese and carrots underneath.
As a side note, our rental car was actually very enjoyable. Usually I always end up with something awful, like a Purple PT Cruiser (no seriously, I had one), but this time we landed a nice, respectable Ford Focus. It was small and zippy, the perfect size to fit all of our stuff, and we averaged around 32 mpg. I had some trouble with how small it was until I figured out the manual pump seat adjustment thing, but after that I appreciated the smallness for parking and navigating. It also had this really sweet dash option that gave you minute by minute updates on how your driving was affecting your fuel economy, which was pretty cool. All in all, probably the best rental car I have ever had. Of course I would never buy something non-GM, but I guess buying any new, American car right now can’t hurt.
Unfortunately, the rental car led to another theme of the trip, which was the dreaded Elmo CD. For her birthday, Evie got an Elmo CD that is customized to say her name. I thought it was really cool, at least at the time. More and more Evie was excited that Elmo was saying her name. “He’s talking to me!” It all came together in the perfect storm on the trip when Evie insisted on listening to the CD over and over again, every time we were in the car. Sara had it worse than me with all the side trips, but we probably listened to it a hundred times. It became torturous and the songs would haunt me in my sleep. I can tell you for a fact that hell is listening to Elmo on an endless loop.
I apologize for this part of the trip being less than exciting. Maybe Sara can expound on some of the fun stuff I missed in the comments. Or you can go back and re-read Part One.
Seattle Part One – Into the Wild
Although she has flown two other times before (Arizona and Philadelphia) it was like flying for the first time to Evie. She was pretty excited about it, but Sara and I were a little dubious since she is a little more active (rambunctious) these days and this was a loooong flight. We had a layover in San Jose, so I think the whole thing was about 6 1/2 hours, not to mention getting to the airport before our flight, etc. We had some free drink coupons from the airline and Sara had the idea that we could pass them out to the people unlucky enough to sit in front of our kicking, screaming monster child. As it (always) turns out, she was the perfect little angel and here we sit with free drink coupons, unredeemed.
Evie was practically giddy with excitement as we prepared to take off, however, as soon as the airplane left the ground her eyes got as big as saucers and she gripped the side of the seat screaming, “Go down! Go down!” When the pilot refused to heed her cries, she moaned in dismay, “It just keeps going higher and higher!” By the time we got home, she was an old pro and enjoyed in particular the take-offs and landings.
The first part of our Seattle vacation was sort of the rugged, outdoorsy, adventure part of the trip. After arriving late and spending the night by the airport, we took a car ferry over to the San Juan islands. As I expected, this was probably my favorite part of the trip. Friday Harbor was sort of Mackinac-ish, with shopping and restaurants and an awesome port to watch boats. The rest of the island is a little more sedate, and we took some awesome hikes. We saw wild deer, 2 foxes, quail, a 6 inch slug (we have a picture to prove it), jelly fish, seals, and, of course, orcas. Unfortunately, we did not see any bald eagles, which are apparently abundant.
Not actually one of our pictures, not even the boat we were on
Of course the highlight of the trip was the whale watching tour to see the orcas (“killer whales”) which live around the islands. Unfortunately, the whales were waaay up in Vancouver, but fortunately the boat was willing to drive all the way up there. They said it was the farthest north they’ve ever gone in that boat. It was well worth the journey, because all 3 of the local pods were together in one “super pod”. There were around 85 whales in the water when we got there. You could see them in almost any direction and I saw several “breaches” (when they jump right out of the water). We got some pictures, but it was hard to capture the coolness. Unfortunately, since we had to spend so much time getting up there and getting back, we didn’t get to see much of the other native wildlife. We did see some seals on the way back though. We were on the boat for like 4 hours and Evie did a marvelous job, never getting cranky.
When we got back, we bought Evie a stuffed orca, Echo, and she became our constant companion for the rest of the trip. We helped Evie choose a name from the orcas that were born the same year she was. Evie was stuck to her like glue. Since Evie’s car seat was on the side of the car instead of the middle, we were worried about closing the door. We would say, “Fingers!” and Evie would say, “Fingers Echo!” I’m happy to report, neither Evie nor Echo lost any fingers in the door.
That was pretty much it for the first part of the trip, but I just wanted to mention (since we were talking about it) that we had an amazingly weird but amazingly tasty sandwich on the trip. The restaurant was Market Chef and the sandwich was “sister’s favorite sandwich”. It consisted of apple slices, cheddar cheese, sunflower seeds, sprouts and dijon mustard, all melted into a gooey deliciousness that is hard to describe. I know it sounds weird, but it was mouth watering!
Vacation Part I – Camping
Our vacation got off to a bad start.
When we left our house the car had a little trouble starting, but I promptly forgot about it. After all, Sara had been driving the car just that morning and she hadn’t had any trouble. Unfortunately though, it did mean something after all and after stopping at a highway oasis to use the bathroom, the car wouldn’t start again. They didn’t have any jumper cables inside and they told me to call the highway patrol for a jump. While waiting for them to show up, I didn’t have anything to do except try and eventually it started. It actually worked out pretty good. We called a relative to find a repair shop further up the road and we were in an out in less than an hour. They said the battery was “older than dirt” and they were surprised I hadn’t had trouble before this. They even fixed my headlight while they were at it. It was probably more convenient than if it would have happened while at home.
So we got to the campsite a little later than expected, but not too much worse for the wear. It was kind of a weird place. First off, it was completely flat with no trees whatsoever. Standing on our campsite we could see all the other campsites, minus those blocked by all the big honking motor homes (which was like all of them). Second off, the camp store had the largest selection of booze I have ever seen outside of an actual liquor store. I mean, it’s one thing to allow drinking in your camp and quite another to stock it 4 deep on the shelves. Third, the place was packed and yet it was…empty. Other than the two tent campers next to us, the entire campsite was silent after nightfall. From every motor home came the flicker of T.V. I just can’t quite fathom why people would even bother going camping if it’s going to be like that. It also rained a little, but it didn’t really effect much; we had time in the morning to let the sun dry everything out before we left.
On Saturday we went to the actual reunion. It was great, as usual. The food was good (especially Grandma’s rhubarb crisp!), it was fun to visit with family, we ended up with some embroidered towels from the raffle and Evie enjoyed the horse drawn wagon rides (she took a few). The weather was very odd. Every 10 minutes it would switch between sunny and hot and rainy and cold as if someone was flipping a switch. Every time it got sunny I was itching to put up the tent, but Sara wouldn’t let me. Her brilliant plan worked to perfection because by the time we finally put up the tent, we missed the rain entirely.
The next day we took our usual yearly trip to the Waupaca Camping Park. This place is really great; they have a lot of cabins and nice tent sites, they are very clean, they have a nice playground and they have a heated pool. The campsites are laid out nicely with lots of trees, etc. We did some hiking, the highlight of which was seeing an enormous turtle, at least two feet long counting the tail, sunning on a rock. We went to a very strange place named the Animal Haven Zoo. It wasn’t really a zoo so much as a series of connected pens. You never knew what you were going to find, one minute you’d be feeding goats, the next minute you’d be checking out some lions. It was way better than I was expecting and I would definitely recommend it. Buy the animal food too, it is well worth $1. They also had a surprisingly nice gift shop.
One day while running around the campsite, Evie fell down and skinned her knee and smashed her face on the pavement. We felt really bad, especially knowing that she was going to have a mark on her cheek in all of her birthday pictures. She wasn’t too concerned though, she was more upset about having to put on a band-aid than anything. Other than that we did all the regular camping stuff; smores, pudgie pies, hot dogs and brats, and more rain. It actually rained 5 out of 7 days that we camped, but the only day it was really a problem was on Thursday when we were getting ready to leave. We were already getting puddles in our tent and everything was soaked by the time we got it into the car. By the time we were ready to go, I was really ready to be home. Evie had a great time and really was an angel. She even slept well!
All in all a very nice vacation!
Shane Halbach 