WA Trip-Part 3

The 2^nd day of our trip, after visiting my grandma, we had a day to chill out with friends (the kids and I have a family we are good friends with-mommas get along as do the kids), then I went out to dinner with some scrapbooking friends-2 of whom I knew from before, but 1 lives in TX and her daughter’s on her second internship with the company Husband used to work with, so it was good to finally meet her in person!

Saturday, we went out to Jetty Island, Sunday was spent visiting with my Mom’s family and making plans with an old friend as well as visiting another friend at Lake Stevens, where the kids played around with the string installation there….

Visiting my grandparents’ home without my grandmother there was very strange.  My grandfather joined in as best he could, but it’s still painfully obvious he’s feeling a bit lost without my grandma around.  They have a very large property.  I haven’t frolicked like I did as a kid through it in years, but many scenes there bring me back to my childhood.

My kids now play with my cousins under “The Big Tree” (the first place one knows to look for missing children). 

 

The creek is down below,

 the hen & chicks are growing in anything that doesn’t move (a relative once told me they forgot their boots at my grandma’s and they retrieved them as quickly as possible fearing a similar fate). 

Grandma also had her gnome garden, with the CDs hanging from fishing line to scare away the birds from the large tree that overhangs it.

 

the canning room is always stocked

 

String installation at Lake Stevens

 

The kids and I went to visit our former neighbors and the kids had a water fight while she and I caught up.  I got to have dinner with a former coworker on my way down to the airport to pick up Husband from his flight. 

That morning he’d awoken me with bad news-there was evidence of dampness in my office from the electrical box repair from the March storm that did not include fixing the siding damage from the updating the box.  My flooring is warped, there’s some suspicious dark stuff at the bottom of the wall and moisture found in the fusebox.  The next few days involved calls with the insurance company as well as the contractor they’d recommended to us.  The calls also involved getting a different adjuster (the first one would not call back for WEEKS or not have any information, not follow up with the contractor, etc.) as well as firing the contractor (3 calls in one week would get me an answer that they weren’t going to get to us yet) and firing the roofer (the subcontracted roofer was trying to charge us extra for covered work-I was a little concerned that the geometry necessary to figure this out seemed to be beyond his scope).

We spent the morning after Husband arrived at Alki beach with old friends playing in the sand and catching up.  The Wednesday was spent in Bellevue taking care of some business for my parents before they unmoored then playing at a splash park up in Bellingham to see a friend from High School church camp and her two kids, which was a treat as until last summer she’d been living in the Midwest and Louisiana.  Mom and I then left the menfolk to tend to the children (eat popcorn and watch Moana) while we checked out Everett Theater’s Dreamgirls production.  Wow.  Effie &  James had amazing voices-they probably didn’t need microphones in the small theater which was completely packed.      The singer who played James had an amazing voice range.

Thursday was a visit to a fellow MOPs mom with a surprise visit from her neighbor, another MOPs mom and another visiting MOPs mom all the way from Colorado!  I think we had 17 kids in the house, it was so much fun to see them all and the kiddos!  Our afternoon was spent visiting one more MOPs mom with kids the same age as my younger 2 kids.

The following weekend was our boat trip-see Part 2 for details and pictures. The night we got back, Husband went out to dinner with a former coworker who has left his former company and the kids and I had us some Red Robin.

V officially turned 7 on our trip.

 

Wednesday morning, we got to hang out at Wright Park in Tacoma which is great, it’s large, has a splash pad, play area, etc. and during the summer they give free lunch to all kids under 18.  They kids played on the play equipment then the splash pad and Paul showed off some mad ribbon twirling skills.  We met my grandma, aunt & two uncles there.

 

I then dropped Husband off at the airport and met a cousin at an amusement place that kept the kids busy while we caught up.

 

Thursday we hung out with friends including a friend of mine from BC, down for the scrapbook retreat we’d go to the next day.  We dropped the kids off with my parents and I took them to Scuttlebutt Brewery nearby where I tried the Graveyard burger (ham, bacon, 2 burgers, mushrooms, cheese….)  It was pretty big.

 

On the way out to the retreat Husband called with more bad news about the house-since it had now been almost 5 months without repairs to the roof, mold was forming in the younger kids’ bedroom closet ceilings.  Good thing I was on the way to a retreat. Husband totally rallied and with a few calls to ask for policy numbers ect that I keep on my computer, he got us all set up to have a new contractor deal with it Monday morning. 

That weekend I got to fill up my soul and play with pretty paper and craft with my scrapbook friends from WA and BC!  I did not have any pictures and just premade pages to add pictures later and make a whole shoebox of cards. 

Monday evening we caught up with my former coworker, turned neighbor & friend while my kids played with her younger son.

Our last full day was super fun at Wild Waves with friends.  They kids rode rides (H actually went on a roller coaster with little prodding and more times and before his older brother!) and really enjoyed the water park.  We got our money’s worth and headed home tired.

The smoke heading south from the BC fires made for some amazing sunsets, but we were glad we left before the air quality resembled Beijing, which it did the week after we left.

 

 

On our departure day, we fit in one more family of friends (a former coworker turned roommate turned mom friend) with breakfast at their house before heading to the airport-they’d been traveling themselves and it was the only time we could get together.  We actually did something similar last summer when  a childhood friend whose husband is in the military and stationed elsewhere and we all only crossed one day for our summer trips home-breakfast at IHOP!

Thursday morning when we arrived, we went to my inlaws as the mold had looked pretty serious and we wanted to get an insurance adjuster and mold specialist onsite before putting the kids in the house.  The bad news is that the mold is concerning enough that we are probably out of the house for an additional 2-3 weeks.  Not what you want to hear when you’ve been away from home for 3 weeks.  The good news is that Husband caught it and dealt with it and my inlaws are letting us stay with them. Do not underestimate the draw of Niagara Falls in the tourist season of summer-although the insurance authorized us to move into a hotel, finding a decent one for 5 people this time of year is a bit tricky, esp with no advance reservations.  The inlaws have more room to space out, cable TV, reliable WiFi and a pool in the backyard, so we are very thankfully staying with them and the insurance is paying us to save them money by doing so.

This weekend I’m off to another scrapbook weekend, this time with the pictures shared with you all from our trip.  When I’d first booked it I thought it was not wise to do so when it was so close after the WA retreat, however after the last few weeks? I’m pretty happy to have a weekend to chill and process the last month!

WA trip: Part 2-Boat Trip

 

 

Our first stop on our boat adventure was Anacortes.  There were deer everywhere! Just wandering the streets!  We played Pokemon Go as we walked to Washington Park.  On the way we found a little Free Library.

 

Next stop was anchoring in harbor at Stuart Island.  We explored the beach-Dad and C went in Kayaks-Dad was a bit surprised how fast C was in his!

We finally found a starfish-they were virtually wiped out several years ago, this is the first I’ve seen in awhile.

 

 

My parents took the kids back to the boat and Husband and I hiked up the hill to see the original schoolhouse and schoolteacher house and check out the great view.

Our last night was in a different part of Anacortes.  There were a ton of Pokemon stops there, so we got the kids to walk into town to collect them and enjoyed perusing the used bookstore and old train station/outdoor art instillation.

 

WA trip: Part 1

Our annual Washington State trip was a little earlier than usual this year due to my parents’ retirement and of course I didn’t want to miss my girl’s scrapbooking weekend away.  This meant we headed westward about 2 weeks after school was out.

We flew Southwest through Midway.  This really is the easiest and cheapest way to make the journey, especially since Southwest Airlines currently doesn’t fly directly from Buffalo to Seattle.  It could be worse.  Back when I went to university in Chicago there were not direct flights yet from Chicago to Seattle.  At least now, the flight is a pretty straight 6-8 hour journey.  Additionally, when we moved to Canada, there were only 2 flights each way a day, now there are 4 to choose from.

Unfortunately, we learned this time that Midway no longer has the looked forward to McDonald’s.  So we made the best of things and tried out the pub.   Very good, generous portions, just a little more expensive than I was expecting.

 

 

We stay on my parents’ boat.  It’s a 45 foot long Nordhaven Trawler.  Kind of tugboat looking.  My mom once told me it’s got 450 square feet of living space, so it’s like a NYC apartment.  For a tour, you can go to http://salishaire.blogspot.com/ and on the right hand side, under “our learning experiences” you can find a December 2016 tour video narrated by my dad.

For this trip, 1 kid usually slept in the living room, 2 kids up in the captain’s area (there are two bunks there) and the hubby and I (when he was onboard, which he was for 10 of the 21 days) get our own private guest room with double pull-out bunk (normally we have a kid sleeping above us, but the bunk above us was already filled with provisions for their inaugural retirement trip to Alaska).

We spend most of our time on board trying to figure out how to keep H off of the grab bar in the salon.

V spends most of her time on board with Jarvis the dog.

 

One nice perk of being moored at the Everett Marina is that we have easy access to Jetty Island park, a beachy, sandy park accessible usually only by ferry which has a long line in the summer or via dinghy for those lucky enough to be boat/dinghy owners.  We usually take 2 trips to get everyone across (though on our last weekend on the boat, my parents upgraded to another dinghy, so maybe future trips will only require one crossing).  The kids enjoy access to warm water that’s shallow for a very long way out and as much sand as they can possibly get their hands, feet, etc. on.

 

Now that I can squeeze into the 12 year old’s shirts, I can just put them on to keep them dry while he swims.

 

On our trips, we do a lot of driving trying to see everyone.  Where we live in Canada, most relatives are within a 10-20 minute drive, so it’s a little weird to drive up to 2 hours to visit someone and sit in this thing called traffic, which is everywhere in the Pacific Northwest and basically non-existent where we live (save summer bridge opening season, where 10-20 waits at a bridge are common while boats travel the canals between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie).

We started off our trip heading to Tacoma to surprise my grandma.  We stopped off at the Almond Roca Brown & Haley factory store where H remarked, "Your store looks very small from the outside, but you really fit a lot in here"

 

The kids did some arts & crafts while waiting for Grandma to return from the bank with my parents.  I believe V's was a note that said something to the effect of, "I'm glad you are alive for us to visit."

 

V waits outside for them to return.

 

The kids are learning navigation and steering.  My parents put up a kiddy run where the children can have their life jackets attached to a run line so they don’t fall off the boat and can play up on the bow.

 

 

While my husband was out, we took a 4 day trip to Anacortes and Stuart Island in the San Juan Islands.  We spent an hour or so waiting for a tide change on the way up and checked out the beach as well as what Pokemon we could find on Pokemon Go.

 

We found  lots of baby crabs under the rocks.

 

The kids tried fishing with a jig hook off the pier we were tied to and all were successful, they had to take turns and H was rewarded for waiting his turn with a double-catch.