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.














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.