Washington Park Arboretum in Spring

Seattle in spring is a beautiful thing.

On this past sunny Saturday, we visited the Washington Park Arboretum to stop and smell the flowers.

and appreciate the trees...

and take close-up pics of nature...

and check out the Japanese Garden...

 

and hike the trails...

and marvel at the magnolias.

Then we drove through the city... look kids! Mt. Rainier!

 

to a neighborhood we'd never visited before - Georgetown - because Erik wanted to check out the legendary Fantagraphics book store, said to publish the best comics in the world.

Erik was in heaven. While he browsed, the kids and I kept busy with a vintage coin press machine in the middle of the store - you could press 32 letters around an aluminum coin.The other half of the store sold oldskool records. The comic graphics and stacked vinyl and retro do-it-yourself souvenir machine made for a not-your-run-of-the-mill shopping experience. Then we went across the street and had a happy hour dinner at Via Tribunali.

The 4 of us split three delicious mini pizzas, a prosciutto plate, and a hazelnut calzone. That plus drinks came to around $45. Sweet!

I would like to thank the sunshine for making this excursion possible.

Seattle got snow!

The rarity of snow in Seattle is why I get giddy when I look out my kitchen window and see a scene like this:

The only thing better than watching it fall is bundling up and walking around in it...

and playing in it...

and laying in it...

and tasting it...

and marvelling at branches encased in ice...

and getting pulled on sleds...

 

to the nearest hill...

where we meet up with neighbors...

and build snowramps...

 

 and fly through the air...

 

 (that's me)

and build snowmen.

And the only thing better than all that is this...

 

and some hot chocolate by the fireplace.

Out and About in 2012

Oh I had such good intentions when I started this blog. I imagined documenting every single Seattle outing our family took, providing pictures and witty informative commentary, becoming a go-to blog for Seattle families and tourists, getting sponsors and press and then getting FAMOUS and RICH! But then I forgot about all that and spent my time doing other things. I do wish I had documented our excursions more though, if only for my own ease in reminiscing. The digital pictures trapped in files on our computer just don't compare to a blog post where I show the best ones and write a few memories and observations.

I'm not giving up though. There's too much we still need to see. I might even share some of these sights with you.

Finding the perfect pumpkin at Carpinito Brothers Farm

Last weekend our family was on a mission to find the perfect pumpkin. The kids have been begging for one ever since the grocery store put big bins of them in front of their store, but I didn't want to get ours that way. I wanted to buy one from the source and pluck it from the ground and give my suburban children the family farm experience complete with corn mazes and fall colors and photo ops.
We searched online - http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/WApnw.php - and the closest one we found was Carpinito Brothers Farm right off highway 167 in Kent, so we decided to make that our Saturday excursion.
It was a popular site that day and we had to park in the far lot but luckily we noticed plenty of wheel barrows available for hauling your produce picks back to your car. We wandered through the pumpkin patch pointing out the ones we thought were the best. There were so many! We waited until the end to get one though because we didn't want to have to lug it around with us while we were in the corn maze.

That's Mt. Rainier in the distance. Can you see it?

 

Carpinito Brothers Farm has TWO corn mazes - one "Huskies" maze in the shape of a football and helmet and one "Cougars" maze in the shape of, well, I couldn't figure out what it was but someone told me it was a cougar face. Not being sports fans or Washington natives, we had no allegiance to either school so we went in both, and there were times when I feared we'd never find our way out.

 

It's funny, the people your run into in a corn maze. Some follow the map and know exactly where they're going, determined to make it all the way through and gather hole punches in their card along the way. Most though, are lost and wandering around wide-eyed and a wee bit worried. It becomes a group effort to get through it with the map-tracking determined ones helping the lost find their bearings. We were, at times, both of these types and after nearly 3 and a half miles of maze-wandering, the wide-open pumpkin patch was a welcoming site.

Next, we headed to the produce stand where we picked out apples, onions, Swiss chard, cabbage, and squash. Then, we each picked out a decorative gourd - the ugliest, weirdest, wartiest ones we could find, and I got some flowers for our front porch. Lastly, and after some debate, we found our pumpkin - a great big 20-pounder, perfectly plump with a stable base and smooth canvas for carving. We got everything weighed, paid, and hauled a wheel barrow back to the car brimming with our autumn bounty.

Lincoln Park up and down

A few weekends ago we visited Lincoln Park, a bluff on overlooking the Puget Sound. It has amazing views of the sound and the Olympic mountains...

and long, steep, winding trails...

 

leading to a path along the shore.

 

It was freezing cold and super windy, so there weren't too many other people there that day.

 

The shore is littered (naturally so) with driftwood 

which is very hard to walk on.

I want to know how old this tree is, where it came from, how it got here. 

That tree's been around!

Sage left his mark.

The trail back up:

That's Sage and me waaaaay down at the bottom.