Our family wanted to see America again, to breathe American air, so since I have seen enough nature recently, we decided to go to a big city, Seattle. We used to live in WA state and I loved this city with the beautiful Cascade mountains, but I wanted to see people and stores and restaurants and most of all, my beloved, Target!
We left on Saturday morning and drove through Banff and Alberta and mostly through British Columbia. It was so much warmer there and rainy!
Our border crossing was a delightful experience. We were so excited and our guard was so kind. It was the first land crossing for everyone, but John and Joshua. At the end, he enthusiastically said, "Welcome to America." We were so happy.
Eating at IHOP was so fun. You have to understand that there are few good restaurants here and they are very expensive. Everyone in Canada eats at Subway and McDonalds and gone are the days of La Madeline, Panera Bread and Los Cucos. Children even ate for free.
The next day, we went into Seattle and took a ferry to an island. While on the ship the Blue Angels were having a show for some kind of Harbor Day and we were thrilled to watch their flyovers. We met all sorts of interesting people.
Next we walked to Pike St and Pike's Place Market. The kids were amazed at the Flying Fish store with the men throwing fish and yelling chants.
It was very crowded, but we did manage to find a Polish Pottery store. It was huge and someone is flying to Poland to get all this. They had some of my patterns too. I could only buy what I could carry.
We saw the original Starbucks on our way to THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY. It was a long walk down crowded city streets, but so worth it. We had the best time there. It was like a little bit of America and a feeling of home.
I asked the question to John, so "why is it so warm in Vancouver and so cold in Calgary when they are at about the same latitude?" This turned out to be so funny. In the end, I think I wanted an answer like. . .I'm so sorry it's so cold in Calgary and so warm in Vancouver, but then the explanations ensued with handmotions,vocabulary and the threat of flowcharts on napkins. . .I didn't even know that wind had anything with water temperature. Grace looked at me so funny at one point and just said, "Mom, if it's not on a test, God made it that way!" We laughed so hard. We used this line for the whole trip.
At night, we went to our Beloved, Target. We had so much fun shopping and decided to buy a video to watch at night called Food Inc. I heard this was good, so we gathered and it wasn't quite as entertaining as I thought. . .in fact we were all very disturbed.
The next day we did more shopping and went to the Seattle Mariner's game. We used to love baseball games and I grew up going to Chicago White Sox games and John was always an Astro's fan. It was great family fun. I love walking around and see all the people. . . they even had a Starbucks.
They opened the roof and the skyline was in the background. As the sunset, it was a beautiful night with a temperature of 61 degrees F. The Mariners won! It reminded me of the last time I was in that stadium when Grace was a baby and we lived in WA state. We saw Randy Johnson pitch. . .that was before Joshua was born and developed a fear of the sound of handclapping.
The way home was uneventful except the border crossing agent was really crabby and made us park and go to the office.
We bought peaches, blueberries, apricots, plums and cherries at a fruit stand on the way home.
13 hours later, as we approached Banff, there was the most magnificent sunset that I have ever seen. There was a double rainbow on Castle Mountain and base of the mountain had a rainbow on it too.
