NCAR Ride

Not a particularly incredible story here, but just a beautiful late March Day bike ride.  This is from the base of NCAR looking toward the snow-covered Bear Peak.  There were a whole herd of deer just chilling and grazing on grass without a care in the world.  More days like this please!

Washington Spring Break Pt. 9 of 9

We stopped next to this building again on the way out from the museum and Gage had to get a picture with this music statue.  

About a mile down from the Space Needle and Glass Museum through some somewhat areas, we continued the day's adventure down to the famous Pike Place Market.  The market has all of this fresh fish, among all sorts of other shops selling tourist-type goods, where they are happy to sell you a fish and throw it across the shop to be caught by the cashier.  Quite the show for us Colorado folk that aren't used to all the fish offerings that Seattle has to offer.  Gavin got in on a picture with a huge Salmon.

In the end, we didn't take any home but did have a great time looking at all of the options.  What a great final day of adventures before heading back to Colorado later that night.  It is always great to get away to somewhere new, see family, and get unplugged from normal life.  Thanks for having us Mom and Bob!

 

Washington Spring Break Pt. 8 of 9

This is how we found Gage this morning.  It seems like his air mattress might have sprung a leak!  He almost had to call for help to get extracted from his cozy bed.  Gavin was lucky and had an actual bed to sleep in, and Gage took one for the team and had this air mattress.  It generally worked out fairly well, though this wasn't what he was planning on exactly...

Today's big adventure was to head to downtown Seattle and find some stuff to do down there.  The first plan was to go to the Space Needle and see some of the art museums that are in that area.

It is fairly impressive to see up close, but it turns out it is quite the tourist racket.  Tickets to go up in the Space Needly are like $40 a person and you only get maybe 15-20 minutes up there before your turn is up.  Deciding that it wasn't worth that, we circled through the souvenir shop for a bit and then walked to our next idea for a fun place. 

We ended up at the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum which turned out to be super awesome!  This kind of stuff is right up Gavin's alley.  All of the work in this museum is hand blown glass and they put together this massive art pieces.

They also do smaller stuff like this bowl-like or flower-like pieces that are beautiful under the light.  This was probably my favorite of all of these types of sculptures.  Some smaller versions of these pieces were on sale in the shop at the end and were quite expensive!

This is a little hard to see but is a glass blown black octopus on top of this whiter crystalline mesh.  I have no idea how they can do some fine work with glass, pretty impressive.

After you walk through the main museum, they had a live glass blowing show going on which you could see and learn about how to make simple pieces.  We stayed and watched this for about 30 minutes before finally moving through to the other side of the gallery, which was more of an outdoor section.

 

Washington Spring Break Pt. 7 of 9

Here is one more picture on the lake of Gage and Tara before we headed back via a different trail which turned out to be quite muddy and super steep.

Here is a picture of me and Tara as we made our way up.  We were definitely feeling the elevation change and took several breaks along the way.

This was one of the funnier things we found along the way.  These mushrooms had some faces drawn on them next to the trail.  It made them look a bit like monkeys.

We were down on all fours grabbing tree branches and bushes to pull ourselves up several of the sections, but we did catch up two these two guys who were hiding in the trees.  Quite an adventure and the kids absolutely loved it!

Washington Spring Break Pt. 6 of 9

Today's main trip was to head down to a second hike location called Saint Edward State Park.  This hike starts at Bastyr College and has several trails that descend down to Lake Washington.  It was once again a bit misty/wet, but apparently that continues to be fairly typical for the area.

Both boys were quick to start exploring and climbing on anything they could shimmy their way up.  Here is Gavin working on this moss-covered tree.  Thankfully, he didn't get too high because it would have been quite easy to take a tumble from an inadvertent slide.

This place was actually filling with bald eagles!  On the way down to the lake, this one was perched about 20 feet above us and proceeded to eat an entire fish dinner.  It was pretty incredible to watch and be so close to these guys.

After about a 30-minute hike down, we made it to the lake.  The lake itself was not too wide, but super long.  Seaplanes would come down and land on the water and take off again, which was pretty impressive to see.  Additionally, there were several more eagles that we saw and countless squirrels.  Here is Gavin and Tara posing under a lakeside tree.

We packed in a lunch and had a nice picnic with the sun actually making a quick appearance just in time for us to eat!

Washington Spring Break Pt. 5 of 9

Further down the trail we stopped to get a picture of the whole crew together.

One of the most interesting finds along the hike was this Geocache that Gavin happened to notice.  Inside this stump there was a little box that looks like it has been here for ages...and of course Gavin was going to see what was inside!

Here is the note about what it was (from inside the box).  It also had a list of names and dates from other people that had found the same thing.  In the end we convinced Gavin he should put it back and we carried on down the trail.

A few pictures of some of the wildlife that we saw while hiking.  This was a deer that seemed to not care that we walked right up and by it while it was foraging for food.  It was quick dark and definitely looked a bit different than what we see in Colorado.

We also saw lots of these slugs that were very slowly making their way down the trails.  I can't actually remember what type they are, but I do remember Grandpa Mike giving us a nice tutorial on them while we were hiking.

We finished the day with some more puzzle work, of course!  This was a fairly challenging puzzle as it was just a bunch of loose patches of color all over the pieces.  The whole family pitched in as we tried to tackle this before we had to head back home to Colorado.

Washington Spring Break Pt. 4 of 9

This day's big adventure was a nice long hike at the Redmond Watershed Preserve.  This area is a favorite of Grandpa and Grandma Mike's and they were happy to show us some of the trails.  It was actually a great temperature for a hike and just a bit overcast.

Some of these pictures were a bit more artistic in nature, but the whole area was just amazing!  This huge trees in the thick forest with ferns all around for ground cover.  Everything was super green.  Here is Tara under the canopy of trees.

This was this really cool old mossy tree stump that we found.

A picture of Gavin and Tara along the way.  You can really get a sense of how wet this place must be for most of the year with moss just hanging off all of the tree branches.  We kept calling it "FernGully".

A quick selfie of Tara and I together on the hike.

I found this little mushroom growing and it was just super delicate and cool.  We left it to keep doing what it was doing before we got there.

Washington Spring Break Pt. 3 of 9

The drive through Whidbey Island was interesting, but we were mostly just passing through to the Port Townsend-Keystone ferry.  Once we arrived at the ferry spot, we had about forty-five minutes to an hour to spend exploring the coastline.  The above picture has Gage exploring the driftwood that has washed up on the shore over time.

This was looking the other direction down the shore.  Lots of seagulls chilling and an old dock that was quite past its prime.  The kids quite enjoyed just looking for shells, rocks, and other random junk on the shore.

I am not sure if this was just Grandpa Mike's idea or something he saw from other people, but we brought a puzzle up the community area and started working in on the ride.  We got some of the outline done and some various pieces, but when it was time to go, we just left the puzzle for someone else to keep working on.  What a great idea and helped to pass the time.  Unfortunately, as you can see, when on the ferries we were instructed to have our masks on...though the air was flowing freely through the place, and it wasn't crowded at all.  We tried to do our best to follow the rules!

We finally arrived in Port Townsend!  It's this cool little port town with lots of sailing boats.  It wasn't necessarily raining but it was kind of misting on us and there was a decent amount of wind keeping it quite chilly.    Gavin is doing his best to cover his ears to keep them warm!

Once again, though, these guys have never found a beach they didn't like to explore.  The spent quite a while looking through the rocks and sand and finding random things and critters.

I took this random picture of the barnacles on this old rotted out pier.  If you look closely, you can see this starfish that got stuck out of the water as the tide receded.  We spent a few hours exploring the city and then snuck into this small coffee shop for some hot chocolate before it was time to take the last ferry back to where we started.  Quite the day and a great time exploring!

With a bit of sunlight still present when we got back to the house.  These guys snuck into the open space beyond my parent's fence and started trying to live like survivalists!  They quickly put together this angled hut anchored by a row of sticks and were promptly coating it in fern leaves.  At least they learned something from all these survivalist shows and youtube...

Washington Spring Break Pt. 2 of 9

They had quite the itinerary for us to see and do stuff all over the area that they had previously scoped out.  For the first full day we got to experience these giant ferries that take both passengers and cars to the different islands or across the bays.  This first passage from Edgewater to Clinton to get to Whidbey Island.  There is this whole complex series of tasks you have to do to get lined up for this: making reservations, printing out tickets, sitting in line at the right time, etc.  It seems hard to me, but I guess people here are used to the process.

Once the ferry arrives, you pull into the belly of the ship and can exit while the crossing is happening.  They have a passenger section above where you can sit, get some coffee, and just hang out.  Here are the guys before we headed inside.  

I think the overall ride was maybe around 30 minutes long, so we had some time to take in the scenery and take some extra photos on deck.  It was a bit chilly with a slight breeze but was mostly dry.

Here are my mom and Bob as our tour guides for the week!

This was our first destination as we crossed over to Clinton.  The plan when we got there was to drive the length of Whidbey Island, taking in all the sights, and then ultimately getting over to Port Townsen.  As I referenced before how complex this was, just imagine having to connect two or three of these ferries together in a row to make the day's trip all work out.  Crazy!

Washington Spring Break Pt. 1 of 9

Over the last several years, my mom and stepdad have been quite active in moving around.  They first sold their Niwot house and moved up to Sequim, WA which is a Northwest of Seattle along the coast opposite from Victoria.  Unfortunately, we never actually made it up to visit them at their house, but it looked beautiful with views looking out over the bay.   A few years later during COVID, they actually sold the Sequim house and moved to upstate New York near Albany, where Bob took a job with a small pharmaceutical company there.  After a year or so in New York, they decided to come back to Washington where they settled in Snohomish.  The new location was a lot more convenient to get to than Sequim and we decided we weren't going to miss a trip and see their new house.  Above, you can see my mom standing outside of their house.

They live up this super steep street but have a great sized lot that backs up to open space (i.e. forested land).  Further, their amazing back yard has these huge trees growing in the middle of the yard.  We were shocked at how green everything was and also just by the sheer size of all the trees that grow there. 

Off their back deck they set up this nice multi-layered bird feeder to accommodate a large crowd seeking both food and shelter from the ever-present rain.  All day long bird would congregate in groups of three, four, or five or more.  Occasionally these bushy squirrels would come and try to jump on it, but Bob would chase them away.

One of the ongoing highlights of the trip was the ping pong table in their basement.  I remember playing quite a lot of table tennis growing up and the kids had a blast putting Grandpa Mike to the test on his home table.  I am not sure they beat him while we were there, but they sure talked some good clean trash.

Sneakers

It's funny the things that kids seem to gravitate towards and find that they need in their life.  Gage found these "finger shoes" that were all the rage and had to order some with some of his allowance money.  They were great while they lasted, though I think after a week they were not that interesting anymore.  At least they weren't that expensive.