KidsQuest, Golden Gardens, and Wallace Falls, Oh my!

This weekend was packed!  Thursday evening we spent at the KidsQuest Museum in Bellevue. It's in the mall and was cool to see all the activities they had for kids of all ages.

P.S. For Christmas gifts, don't go buy anything expensive. All the toys in the under 3 section were easy crafts, like the bottle to the left (empty pepsi product bottle) filled with some sort of liquid and glitter and then taped shut with electrical tape. Or the wooden blocks below. He was delighted with both, more so than he's been with store bought trinkets!

Then Friday night we went to Golden Gardens, which is another beach park just south of Carkeek. Trevor has the pics for the rest of the weekend so I'll add those later. :) It was a lot more like a California beach in that the sand was very fine and there were tons of people playing beach volleyball, having BBQs, and flying kites. The water is much to cold to swim in, but there were tons of sailboats. We went out on a pier (? I think its called a pier...a wooden structure built to make a little boardwalk that goes perpendicular to the beach...anyone know?) and saw all sorts of sea life. There were TONS of jellyfish (probably another reason for no swimmers), starfish (one in particular that was HUGE), a sea cucumber, a crab, and schools of fish.

Saturday we had the best intentions of going down to the Seattle Aquarium and Pike's Place Market, however upon our arrival we found out there was a half marathon that had half the streets closed, PLUS a parade, PLUS a cruise ship leaving a port next door to the Aquarium. Needless to say, all parking was either unapproachable or marked "Event Parking" and had doubled the price. At one point Trevor turned to me and said we'd just have to pay a little extra for parking, and turned into a place. Sometimes I get a little too Scrooge-ish and Trevor has to remind me that lots of things in life are worth paying extra for. Upon finding a lot he pulled in. However, shortly we were pulling out again as over $20 just to park tipped his scale the other way. We'll try that again another weekend when hopefully less is going on!

So then we decided to drive straight up to the Cascade Mountains to Wallace Falls. It's a nice little hike with several large waterfalls. Good thing we had packed a lunch and Gideon's carrier for the aquarium because we were all set to hike!  The nice thing about hiking in WA is that there are lots of trees to shade the trail and the trail was a well-maintained trail of packed dirt covered in pine needles, making it easier to walk on than the UT trails that tend to be covered in rocks and gravel. Another difference is that WA rivers and waterfalls could eat UT rivers and waterfalls for breakfast. Maybe prebreakfast. Wallace Falls alone probably has more water flowing over it than the sum total of every waterfall in UT. Beautiful.

On our way home, we stopped by the Root Beer Store. I've never seen so many different types of root beer!  We had to contact our root beer connoisseur brother-in-law to figure out where to start!  We bought several different types. Luckily, they sell them by the single bottle so you aren't buying 6 packs of each just to try them!  I think one of the greatest values of education is that it teaches you to look twice at things and then analyze them and what they mean to you. What does this tell you about yourself? About life?  The Root Beer Store makes me grateful that I don't have that many options in the regular grocery store. I'm the person that can stand and stare at two different brands who offer the same product for the same price and take 20 minutes to decide which one I want only to change my mind and go back and switch it before checkout (Trevor is a very patient man but even he tires of this quickly). I'm the sort of person who prefers Redbox to Blockbuster or Netflix because in every Redbox there is usually only 2-3 good options to choose from and you just pick the one in the genre you're feeling like. Simple-minded of me?  Perhaps. However, it is who I am and I like who I am.