Washington Vacation 2008: The Wedding
After the beach we took a couple of days to travel up from Long Beach to Leavenworth. The stop in Yakima wasn't really anything to write home about - Yakima is quite different from the other places in Washington we visited - dry, dusty, more desert than anything. But it was a good stopping-off point. Becky shot pictures from the moving van like a wild woman. She did get a rather nice one of Mount Rainier:
Also, on our way up to Leavenworth, the girls had fun throwing rocks into this little mountain stream:
Once we made it to Leavenworth, we had a great time with family and friends at the wedding. We stayed at the Riverdance Lodge, which you really must check out via their website to appreciate. It's a ridiculously posh vacation home which happens to be right next door to the house that Andrew & Heather were borrowing for the wedding. So, our family rented it to stay for a couple days. Fantastic choice.
I've got a whole set of photos on Flickr from the rehearsal and before and after the wedding, and it's really hard to decide which ones to show here, so I'll just give you one of them and you can go visit the set. In this particular pic, Andrew and Heather were kinda bored during the photo shoot and gave me this little pose:
Such fun. There's one more I'd post, but somehow I didn't get it uploaded to Flickr yet. I'll make a separate post for that one picture - how often can you say you have a guy relieving himself against a tree in the background of a wedding picture? 
The wedding was beautiful and went about as smoothly as any wedding I've ever been to. I played the piano, Ryan sang, Laura and Addie were beautiful flower girls. They also had a lot of fun dancing afterwards. What a fantastic time of celebration.
Washington Vacation 2008: The Beach
After arriving late on Monday and having vehicle difficulty, we took the new minivan out to the Washington coast to spend a couple of days at the beach. We encountered several of these signs along the way... not something we typically see back home in Iowa.
The three-hour drive to the appropriately-named Long Beach brought us from temperatures in the upper 70's in the Seattle area to 60 degrees, fog, and 30 mph winds in Long Beach. Yowza! We were glad we had remembered to pack jackets. We stayed at the Lighthouse Oceanfront Resort as part of a little deal where I created them a new website. We had a two-bedroom condo that, when the fog was out, provided us a view of the Pacific from our deck. The girls had much fun on the beach even in the cold; Laura found a real live clam, which stayed real and live until it had set in our minivan for a day, at which point it became real and very ripe. To spend actual time in the water, though, we enjoyed the heated pool at the resort.
The second day we ventured out to check out one of the nearby lighthouses. We tried to figure out how to reach the lighthouse on Cape Disappointment, but couldn't figure out which road to take. So instead we visited the North Head Lighthouse, and while we couldn't tour it (no children under 7 allowed on the tour), we still had a nice little walk and got some nice pictures of the lighthouse and the coast. Apparently the North Head Lighthouse records some of the strongest winds along the Pacific coast. We didn't quite blow away, but it was seriously breezy.
Having traveled to the coast, the one thing Becky really wanted to eat was seafood. We did a little research and tried out a couple of different places that appeared to be somewhat family-friendly and within our budget. My conclusion is that seafood places in tourist towns must plan to sell you overpriced seafood and then make up for it with terrible service. The first night we tried a place called Doogers, and while my food was decent, the server totally forgot to bring me the Diet Pepsi I ordered. Becky's combination platter was completely missing one of its major elements, a fact which wasn't brought to light until Becky decided to ask for help identifying each of the elements on the platter. They went ahead and cooked up a razor clam and brought it out to her at the end of the meal, but still, come on, folks. The second night we tried The Crab Pot, supposedly a local favorite since 1946. We thought that surely it would be an improvement over Doogers. No such luck. Higher prices, poorer food, and incredibly awful service.
Still, though, we found a local bakery that was fantastic, and overall very much enjoyed ourselves in Long Beach. It would have been fun to have another day to spend traipsing around, but our schedule called us to move on. Next up: Yakima, en route to Leavenworth.
Note: I'm putting all the pics from the trip in this set on Flickr. There are far more than what I'm going to post on the blog. Grandparents will want to visit the link to see all the pics.
An apology of sorts
I had really intended to keep the blog up-to-date while on this vacation - after all, during the vacation I have even more to write about than I would otherwise. Sadly, though... well, maybe not so sadly, I've been vacationing rather than blogging. I have been taking lots of pictures, though, so they'll show up eventually, along with some thoughts.
Short summary, though: Andrew and Heather were married yesterday evening in a beautiful outdoor ceremony. The weather was fantastic, everything was well-organized and -executed, and the party afterward was a lot of fun. Now it's Sunday morning and all of us who remain here are more than a little tired... but it was quite worth it.
More later, I promise.
The Flat Tire
A couple of pics of our minivan's flat tire the other night. Less dramatic because the guys already had the van jacked up. The thing was totally flat.
In Seattle
Day 1 of our vacation finally brings us to Seattle. Our flights were only delayed a little - we arrived at SEA maybe 30 minutes after our scheduled arrival time. Our luggage came through intact. (Had we known that the minivan we are renting had built-in child seats, we could've saved ourselves one piece of luggage... but ah well.)
The girls handled the trip wonderfully. Addie was mostly excited about seeing all the airplanes - her little nose was pasted to the window as much as possible, though she had to be up on her knees to see out the plane window - she's too short to see out otherwise! Laura's greatest excitement came from seeing the mountains out the airplane window. She's never been to the mountains before, and when she saw the snowcaps, she let out a loud whoop, and kept yelling "Mountains, Mommy, mountains!"
We got in our aforementioned minivan and headed the few miles to our hotel. I was thinking the van felt a little funny but wasn't quite sure. When we got to the hotel, it was definitely feeling funny... and yep, there was a flat tire on the back. Ugh. As frustrating as it was to have rented a vehicle with a flat right off the lot, I must say that Alamo handled it pretty well - I called the local rental place, they told me that it'd be no charge since it was right off the lot, they forwarded me to roadside assistance who had somebody at my location within 45 minutes to put on the spare. Then I drove the van on the donut spare back to SEATAC to exchange it for a different van. That was an hour and a half I would have preferred not to waste, but hey, it's done now.
Tomorrow we're headed down to spend a couple days on the coast. Can't wait.
Packing for the trip
With the expense of airline travel these days, we thought we might consider a method of cost-reduction for this trip.
Laura demonstrates the proper way to pack the bag:
She feels pretty safe since she's just a bit to big to fit into that bag.
Seattle here we come!
