Sunday, May 31, 2009
West Coast - Day 16
We spent the morning in the hotel room, as we had reserved a harbour cruise at 12:15pm, and that did not give us enough time to do anything else once we got through breakfast and the regular morning routine. We ate breakfast in our room, as we had fruit from yesterday and the breakfast room was packed full of people again. We then tried to put Evan down for a morning nap and gave Xander a morning quiet time before lunch, but I don't think either really worked. Once we finished lunch, we herded the kids out and made our way back to the monorail and took it downtown.
To get to the harbour, you have to go down a lot of steep roads, and even after that, you get to a point where you have to take stairs. I'm not certain how cars get down, but it must occur somewhere quite far away from the part of downtown where we were. We ended up carrying the kids and the strollers downstairs in order to get to the pier where our tour left from. We arrived about a half hour before the tour boarded, so we walked to the end of the pier and looked at the water for a bit.
The cruise was nice, except that neither kid really wanted to be there. They definitely did not want to be on the deck (too windy), and even when we sat inside, Evan kept getting upset and Xander kept disobeying. Xander got more excited once we arrived at the industrial section of the harbour, with all the container ships and cranes, while I ended up just ignoring Evan, as he would start screaming if I even made eye contact with him.
After the cruise, we took the monorail back to the park and went to the the Children's Museum here in Seattle. It was another hit with the kids and roughly similar to the last children's museum we went to. It had a grocery store, a pretend Taco Time fast food restaurant, a mountain area and an area with odd pipes and levers where you could put small plastic balls through the pipes - some had compressed air running through them.
Once we figured out where the balls went and how it worked, Xander had a lot of fun making them go from one side to the other, where they would fall among cymbals and other musical instruments in order to make noise. Once everyone was pretty hungry we left and started walking out of the park.
Before leaving, we stopped and watched a street performer do a short act - he was a juggler and rode a unicycle and he put on a fairly good show. Xander got right into clapping along with everyone else. When the act was over, we went for supper and then returned to the hotel room. We've decided to head home in the most direct route, which means going into Canada at Abbotsford and then taking the #1 to Calgary. I am very ready to just head home, as I am pretty much wiped out. Tomorrow should be mostly a travel day, but we will see how far we can go with Evan, as he hasn't been lasting very long in the car lately.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
West Coast - Day 15
Due to the fact that I did not have to drive, today was a better day, though walking through Seattle has its own perils - there are a fair number of homeless people who are either drunk or more than a bit muddled. We saw one guy walk out into the street and start yelling at the cars, while another guy walked up to us and told us that he wished he could make us understand. Anyway, back to our actual adventures.
We started the day by fighting our way through breakfast, since the hotel was fairly full with at least one school group and the breakfast room was packed. We then walked the three blocks to the park where the Space Needle is and rode the monorail to downtown Seattle, where we walked down to the Pike Place Market. Even early in the morning, it was fairly busy, which turned out to be because they were having a fair in the market today. By the time we left, it was almost impossible to push a stroller through the throngs of people.
For the first little bit, we just explored. The famous fish stand turned out to be a bit of bust, since it was surrounded by 100 eager tourists and no one who was buying any fish. One of the workers even asked in desperation if anyone wanted to buy fish today. If I lived here, I'm not certain I would shop there - by walking up to the counter, you become the center of attention, with 100 cameras trained on you. As we wandered through the shops, we decided to buy food for supper from the shops, rather than eating in yet another restaurant. Plus, our hotel room has a full kitchen, so we would be able to buy some corn and cook it.
About half way down the main street of the market is the first Starbucks location, which I stopped in and bought some coffee beans and a coffee, just so I could say that I had. I don't know if all Starbucks are like this, but they take your order on one side and then throw your empty cup across the room to the barista that actually makes your coffee and calls out your name when it is done. At the far end of the market they had set up a stage for the fair, and a local all girl band was playing as we walked back into the market to shop for supper. I felt very much like a Seattle cliché - walking through Pike Place Market, drinking Starbucks coffee, while the girls screamed out Celebrity Skin.
We left the market and stopped for lunch at McDonald's, before taking the monorail back to the park and then taking all our stuff back to the hotel room. We then walked back to the park in order to go to the Science Fiction Museum. The museum was extremely cool, but you will just have to take my word for it, since you weren't allowed to take pictures. Sandra did take a picture of the sign for the bathroom, which I will add to the blog, since it is a pretty cool (and geeky) sign. The museum had a lot of displays with the various science fiction books and
authors as well as memorabilia from movies and TV shows. I'll just list a bunch of stuff we saw - the original captain's chair from the Enterprise set, the Enterprise-D model used for filming Next Generation, the Death Star model used for filming Star Wars, an animatronic Donatello, a stormtrooper costume, Corporal Hicks armour and gun from Aliens, the Terminator head and hand from T2, and an entire wall filled with various science fiction weapons (but no lightsaber - and I told Xander we would see one - *sigh*). There were also some interesting multimedia displays, but they were either packed full of geeks or too long to sit and watch with the children, so I skipped most of them. The one was a bunch of computer terminals where you could look up information on every spaceship from every science fiction series. The terminals were packed with people, but they had a huge screen behind them that was showing a looping movie of all the different ships flying past, landing at spacedocks and so on, so I held Xander and watched it go through all the ships once.
I couldn't find anything really interesting to buy in the gift shop, and I was really hoping for a lightsaber so that Xander would stop complaining. Before we left, Xander decided he wanted to go through the Jim Henson temporary display. I carried him through it, but it was mostly drawings and pictures, with just a few Muppets here and there. He didn't even seem very excited when we saw Bert and Ernie, so once we had quickly seen everything, we left. After the museum, we went up to the top of the Space Needle, took some pictures, returned to the ground, bought some ice cream and then returned to the hotel for supper.
Friday, May 29, 2009
West Coast - Day 14
Well, at this point, I am ready to go home. The day started off easy enough, as we got up late, packed up the car and headed to the Portland Children's Museum, which is right beside the zoo. That meant that it was a route we had already driven, so it was an easy trip to make.
The museum was a big hit with the kids. It had a ton of things to do, though it was pretty busy with school trips, which meant we had to push Xander a bit to play. There was a water area full of contraptions to pump water through, and dozens of ways to end up soaked. They had a stage and auditorium with a dressing room full of clothes so that the kids could dress up and act in front of their parents. There was face painting (but neither boy was interested), a large wooden train set to play with and a clay area, where you could build things out of clay. However, the clay did not interest either boy. The bigger hit was the Bob the Builder section, which had models of all the characters that the kids could climb in, as well as a bunch of other building projects for the kids. Xander and I built a wall that Papa would be proud of, while Evan spent the entire time mastering the stairs, since they were half-sized, which meant he could go up and down like a big boy.
At the other end of the museum, there was a dig pit, which was an area full of chopped up rubber and a bunch of Tonka trucks, various shovels and pails, and a couple of wall mounted conveyors to put the "dirt" in. Xander had a lot of fun filling a dump truck and playing in the "dirt", but it was a very busy area and he wanted me to come and join him, which I wasn't allowed to. I think that shortened the time he spent playing. Another cool area was a small grocery store and diner, where the kids could pretend to shop, or work at the supermarket, or be a short order cook. Again, it was a bit packed, but Xander had a great time buying some food. Unfortunately, he thought the corn he bought was real and that we would be eating corn on the cob for supper and he was pretty disappointed when we had to put all the food back.
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Early in the afternoon, we drug the kids away, hoping that they would be tired enough to sleep during the trip to Seattle. Again, that was not the case, as both kids stayed awake. The trip to Seattle was horrible. The interstate between Portland and Seattle is extremely busy - it was 6 lanes almost the entire way and we encountered completely stopped traffic going into Tacoma, due to two recent accidents that had closed lanes and a brush fire beside the interstate. After inching through that traffic, we hit the Tacoma rush hour traffic and we were stopped for another 15 minutes or so. Thankfully, we were going the opposite direction of the Seattle rush hour traffic, as the four lanes heading south were full of stopped vehicles for approximately 40km (from Tacoma until the outskirts of Seattle). Who in their right mind drives in that kind of traffic every day?
Once we arrived in Seattle, things got worse. Evan started screaming and throwing a fit and there was no way to calm him down, nor was there any place to pull over and take him out of the car. The freeway was five lanes wide by this point and full of cars, though they were all moving. However, I ran into massive problems once we got off the freeway. The actual roads of Seattle are impossible to navigate unless you know where you are going and even the GPS was of limited usefulness. It would tell you to turn right, but not that you had to be in the leftmost lane in order to make it past the two intersections before the place where you were supposed to turn. I ended up in two right hand turning lanes that I wasn't supposed to be in, as well as a bunch of road construction, which forced us to cut a bunch of people off to change lanes, all while Evan was screaming at the top of his lungs. Luckily, we managed to find our hotel, despite turning twice when we weren't supposed to, and I quickly fled the car to get our room. Honestly, if we hadn't reserved a hotel room in Seattle, I would not have stopped, and we would be in Vancouver right now, on our way home.
However, we are here, and we are three blocks away from the Space Needle, which is where 90% of the stuff we want to see is, so I don't have to drive until we leave, and I will try to enjoy myself while I am here.
The museum was a big hit with the kids. It had a ton of things to do, though it was pretty busy with school trips, which meant we had to push Xander a bit to play. There was a water area full of contraptions to pump water through, and dozens of ways to end up soaked. They had a stage and auditorium with a dressing room full of clothes so that the kids could dress up and act in front of their parents. There was face painting (but neither boy was interested), a large wooden train set to play with and a clay area, where you could build things out of clay. However, the clay did not interest either boy. The bigger hit was the Bob the Builder section, which had models of all the characters that the kids could climb in, as well as a bunch of other building projects for the kids. Xander and I built a wall that Papa would be proud of, while Evan spent the entire time mastering the stairs, since they were half-sized, which meant he could go up and down like a big boy.
At the other end of the museum, there was a dig pit, which was an area full of chopped up rubber and a bunch of Tonka trucks, various shovels and pails, and a couple of wall mounted conveyors to put the "dirt" in. Xander had a lot of fun filling a dump truck and playing in the "dirt", but it was a very busy area and he wanted me to come and join him, which I wasn't allowed to. I think that shortened the time he spent playing. Another cool area was a small grocery store and diner, where the kids could pretend to shop, or work at the supermarket, or be a short order cook. Again, it was a bit packed, but Xander had a great time buying some food. Unfortunately, he thought the corn he bought was real and that we would be eating corn on the cob for supper and he was pretty disappointed when we had to put all the food back.
Early in the afternoon, we drug the kids away, hoping that they would be tired enough to sleep during the trip to Seattle. Again, that was not the case, as both kids stayed awake. The trip to Seattle was horrible. The interstate between Portland and Seattle is extremely busy - it was 6 lanes almost the entire way and we encountered completely stopped traffic going into Tacoma, due to two recent accidents that had closed lanes and a brush fire beside the interstate. After inching through that traffic, we hit the Tacoma rush hour traffic and we were stopped for another 15 minutes or so. Thankfully, we were going the opposite direction of the Seattle rush hour traffic, as the four lanes heading south were full of stopped vehicles for approximately 40km (from Tacoma until the outskirts of Seattle). Who in their right mind drives in that kind of traffic every day?
Once we arrived in Seattle, things got worse. Evan started screaming and throwing a fit and there was no way to calm him down, nor was there any place to pull over and take him out of the car. The freeway was five lanes wide by this point and full of cars, though they were all moving. However, I ran into massive problems once we got off the freeway. The actual roads of Seattle are impossible to navigate unless you know where you are going and even the GPS was of limited usefulness. It would tell you to turn right, but not that you had to be in the leftmost lane in order to make it past the two intersections before the place where you were supposed to turn. I ended up in two right hand turning lanes that I wasn't supposed to be in, as well as a bunch of road construction, which forced us to cut a bunch of people off to change lanes, all while Evan was screaming at the top of his lungs. Luckily, we managed to find our hotel, despite turning twice when we weren't supposed to, and I quickly fled the car to get our room. Honestly, if we hadn't reserved a hotel room in Seattle, I would not have stopped, and we would be in Vancouver right now, on our way home.
However, we are here, and we are three blocks away from the Space Needle, which is where 90% of the stuff we want to see is, so I don't have to drive until we leave, and I will try to enjoy myself while I am here.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
West Coast - Day 13
In Portland, we hit a little bit of stopped traffic, but nothing too horrible. We stopped at a Safeway to resupply before heading back to the hotel and ordering a pizza.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
West Coast - Day 12
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
West Coast - Day 11
We are spending the next three days in the Portland area, which means I get a couple of days where I don't have to pack and unpack the car. I reserved a suite in a Holiday Inn Express, which means we have a separate room for the boys to sleep in. That will help Evan, as for the past week he has been going to sleep very late, since we were all in the same room. It also helps me, as it means that I can sit around with the light on while the boys fall asleep, rather than spend the whole time in the dark.
Monday, May 25, 2009
West Coast - Day 10
Sunday, May 24, 2009
West Coast - Day 9
We took a different path out of the park, which included a much shorter drive on a slow gravel road and a longer drive on a
Saturday, May 23, 2009
West Coast - Day 8
We got a real late start today, as it was 10:45 before we left the hotel, and as we were sick of fast food, we stopped by a grocery store to pick up some real food to eat. That meant it was 11:30 by the time we got out of Ukiah and on the road. Actually, I guess it was 10:30 local time - we haven't switched to Pacific time, but have kept the kids on Saskatchewan time, as we figured it would allow us to get up an hour earlier. Unfortunately, that did not work out real well today.
After a short time driving and trying to convince Xander that redwoods still had green leaves, we stopped at a rest stop, ate lunch and then continued on our way. We soon arrived at the Avenue of Giants, which is a very scenic drive through the redwoods that runs parallel to the main highway. It was a very impressive drive, with huge trees on either side of the road and multiple spots where you could pull over and take pictures,
which we did. The only problem with this was that we had driven very slowly and stopped multiple times, so it was getting late and we had not even made it to Eureka, so we went back on to the main highway and drove past Eureka. Eureka is on the coast, so we got our first view of the ocean this trip and after arriving in the park, we stopped at a beach to let the boys play in the sand and see the waves. Evan loved it, but Xander was terrified of the waves and kept trying to go back to the car.
It was 4:30pm local time (5:30pm for us) when we arrived at a tourist trap called the Trees of Mystery. It was kind of late but there was still time to walk through the forest, so we did. There were some very impressive trees along the path - I was amazed by the way that the trees would grow anywhere. One of the trees actually had multiple other trees growing out of its branches. There was also a cathedral area created by nine trees that grew so close together that they created a little alcove.
They hold Easter services and weddings in the location. It looked like a place where Kyle and Andrea should have got married - we could have all dressed in green and carried longbows. At one point on the path, there is a Sky Train - basically an enclosed ski lift - that takes you up to an observation point on the mountainside. Being scared of heights, I really did not want to go, but the guy running it kept pressuring us and Xander got really excited about it, so we went on the "ride". It wasn't too bad, except for the fact that it stopped moving at three points on the way up (and on the way down) so that other cars could be unloaded and loaded. I did not like sitting there with the car rocking back and forth that high above the forest. Unfortunately for my future, both kids loved the ride - Xander wanted to get right back on as soon as we got off.
We left the Trees of Mystery and drove to Crescent City, where we tried to get a room for the night. We were a little worried that it would be busy due to the Memorial Day weekend, and we were correct. Both the Best Western and Super 8 were full, but a local hotel called the Lighthouse had two rooms left when I arrived. As we moved all the stuff into the hotel, a whole bunch of people kept arriving looking for rooms, so I guess this weekend is a busy travel weekend, at least along the coast of California.
The hotel is very nice, but our room is at the far end of the hotel and the wireless signal didn't reach, so I had to sit in the lobby to do my blog posting. That turned out to be a very good thing, as I overhead the hotel worker telling some tourists that the Endor scenes from Jedi were filmed near here, so I got some information on it and we're going to visit that location before leaving town. Sandra thinks Xander will be super excited when I tell him where we are going. I also reserved a hotel room in Coos Bay, Oregon for tomorrow, since we don't want to be stuck without a hotel room with the boys.
We left the Trees of Mystery and drove to Crescent City, where we tried to get a room for the night. We were a little worried that it would be busy due to the Memorial Day weekend, and we were correct. Both the Best Western and Super 8 were full, but a local hotel called the Lighthouse had two rooms left when I arrived. As we moved all the stuff into the hotel, a whole bunch of people kept arriving looking for rooms, so I guess this weekend is a busy travel weekend, at least along the coast of California.
The hotel is very nice, but our room is at the far end of the hotel and the wireless signal didn't reach, so I had to sit in the lobby to do my blog posting. That turned out to be a very good thing, as I overhead the hotel worker telling some tourists that the Endor scenes from Jedi were filmed near here, so I got some information on it and we're going to visit that location before leaving town. Sandra thinks Xander will be super excited when I tell him where we are going. I also reserved a hotel room in Coos Bay, Oregon for tomorrow, since we don't want to be stuck without a hotel room with the boys.
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