We had a great time. Google tells us that it's about a 13.5 hours to drive to Seattle, and we made it there in about 14. Our timing coming home was not so good, in part because of bad weather. We were also stymied by some mixed exits in Seattle and Boise. And also, we lacked the promise of "let's go see your cousins," which meant our children were not as eager to consolidate their bathroom trips and hurry up in general. (Also, I drove most of the way there, and Eric drove most of the way home, which says something about our driving, I think.)
We arrived on Sunday night. On Monday we went to the Kubota Garden, which was wonderful and lovely.
Then we went to the Museum of Flight, which was way cooler than I expected. We spent a lot more time there than we had originally planned. Everyone loved it. Trixie was enthralled with the full-sized airplanes hanging from the ceilings. She is used to the 1/72 scale models that hang in her brothers' room. There were cool exhibits, and it was just generally a great museum. (Plus, they are part of the ASTC Passport Program, so we got to use our Thanksgiving Point memberships to get us in for no admission!)
After that we met with Eric's sister and her kids at the arboretum. The kids were pretty tired by this point, but they did reasonably well with all the walking.
That evening Eric's sister and her husband generously watched our kids for us while we went and got dim sum, and it was awesome. I had dim sum a number of times growing up, but Eric had never had the experience. I need to look into restaurants in Salt Lake that do that kind of service.
Tuesday we took the long route to our beach house on Marrowstone Island. First, our family headed up to an awesome museum in Everett called the Imagine Children's Museum. (Again, this venue is part of the ASTC Passport Program, so we didn't pay admission.) There were so many cool things to do there. We could have stayed all day. (I took some pictures, but I won't bother you with them since this post already has so many pictures.)
When Eric's sister and her family were in our vicinity, we left Everett and headed to meet the cousins at the Skagit Tulip Festival. We were a bit early for the tulips, but we went to a tulip farm that had lots of daffodils in bloom, and we took pictures there.
From there we headed to Deception Pass State Park to enjoy some views and to throw rocks in the water. (And, if you were Trixie, to also try to eat some rocks.) Miraculously, nobody was hit by any errant rocks. (And, in case you were wondering, no, I cannot skip rocks. Eric can, though.)
Then we caught our ferry and headed over to our beach house on Marrowstone Island. It was a great beach house, and huge kudos to Michelle for finding it. She and Eric spent an absurd amount of time combing every possibility for a beach house for our two families and weighing pros and cons of all of them. I found it rather exhausting and definitely got to a point where I was like, "Just tell me when y'all pick something, because I do not even care anymore." I was well beyond that point when Michelle discovered this place, and it was priced way lower than it should have been and easily could accommodated a group bigger than ours. I don't have many pictures of the house, but I do have pixely phone picture of Trixie supervising her uncle in making Thai food.
The house had amazing views and lots of beds with lots of bedrooms. Plus, there was beach access via long and steep stairs.
The families went down to the beach a couple of times, but I only went down once. (It was beautiful but also pretty cold, and I was having back pain for some reason. Thankfully, it cleared up and didn't plague me the whole trip!)
The kids loved playing together in the beach house and down at the beach. Eric made Felix and his same-aged cousin recreate this picture from our Oregon beach house in 2015. It went really well, as you can tell.
On Thursday we eventually got ourselves packed up and loaded. We took the direct route back to Seattle and rode the ferry from Bainbridge Island into downtown. Eric and I rode it in 2007, and it was fun to look at the picture of us then verses our family of five (and growing!) now. We've changed a lot in these nearly ten years.
Then we went to the zoo. We had also gone to the zoo in 2012 when Michelle and I were both pregnant with our second kids. Again, it was fun to recreate a picture while we were there. Trixie was the same age for this trip as Ike was the last time we were in Seattle, so that was also fun to think about. She is crazy about animals, and her face lit up with so much joy the first few times she spotted some.
We had discussed staying until Saturday, but Friday's weather was pretty lousy, and the thought of diving straight back into real life with 8:30 church on Sunday morning, followed by me returning to work on Monday and Tuesday, made us decide to head out on Friday morning instead. It was nice having all of Saturday to run errands, do laundry, and just generally catch up before delving back into the last few weeks of school.
