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.
