Sister Act

We took a walking tour of Seattle's International District and ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant.  We wandered the tunnels underneath the city on the Underground Tour.  We picnicked at Pike Market and watched ships and salmon travel from Lake Union to Lake Washington at the Hiram Ballard Locks.  Camille's family was in Seattle the weekend of July 24 to 26, 2015, waiting to hear Spencer's homecoming talk on Sunday, before traveling home to Utah.  On Friday and Saturday, Lisa and I joined the Eberts in exploring Seattle.  The rest of Lisa's family was at the Flindt family reunion at a lake east of Seattle. 

On Friday afternoon, we met our walking tour guide at the Wing Luke Museum in the International District.  She gave us a private tour, geared to the children.  The adults loved it, as well!  Lisa and I were impressed that the stories our guide told and places we visited were so different from the sites on the International District walking tour we took several years ago. 

We stopped by a fortune cookie factory that supplies cookies for all over Washington.  There were big bags of  "flat rejects (unfortunate)."  We chose the "fortunate" fortune cookies in the newest flavors, including ginger.

The street signs are in both Mandarin and English.

At the tops of apartment buildings are decorated doors.  Those were the headquarters for associations which help new immigrants.  They were organized by family or clan.  For instance, the Li's, a common Chinese name, would have their own association.

Our guide showed us the hidden doors in some of the buildings.  During Prohibition in the 1920's, people who wanted a drink could slip inside.  There also were gambling dens inside some of the buildings.

We stopped by the huge Chinese grocery store.  Washington has some of the best fresh oysters in the world, and there were also live crabs for sale.  Asian people like to buy their meat fresh.

We stopped at Seattle's ornate train station from the 1920s, now an event space.

We also visited a Chinese apartment from the 1950s.  There were some distinctively Chinese items, such as a game of mahjong, but also the sorts of refrigerator, stove, and other appliances that my mother had in her home during the 1950s.

Chinese people have many associations.  We passed the building housing the association which helps business owners, and we saw Chinese men relaxing outside.  Increasingly, Chinese people are moving to the suburbs, and they are being replaced in the International District by Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians. 

We appreciated Trip Advisor, which steered us to a great Chinese restaurant in the International District--the Jade Garden.

Neither Lisa nor Camille had taken the Underground Tour through the tunnels under Seattle's downtown.  I have taken the tour twice before, but I enjoyed it again.  There were too many innuendos and off-color jokes for our taste, but otherwise we enjoyed learning a bit about Seattle's history.  The original buildings in downtown Seattle were too low to have good drainage, so the city fathers just covered over the bottom story of the buildings and made the second floor the ground floor.  That left acres of tunnels and abandoned basements.

We could look up from the tunnels and see tiny glass "windows" in the sidewalk above us.

Toilets, furniture, and machinery were simply abandoned in the underground passageways.

On Saturday morning, we met at Pike Market.  We bought sandwiches, croissants, macarons, and Napoleons at La Panier, a wonderful French bakery, and ate them on the grass next to the Market.

We then wandered through the Market, pausing to taste different varieties of honey and olive oil.  Throughout the market, there was produce to taste--different flavors of jam, hazelnuts, and jerky.  A man at a produce stand even sliced off pieces of a fresh peach and handed them to passers-by.

On Saturday afternoon, we visited the Hiram Ballard Locks, north of Seattle.  Camille and her children inspected the fish ladders, which help salmon make their way upstream to spawn.  Lisa and I watched the boats go through the locks.  We were fascinated by one bright orange boat.  We talked to a crewman, as the boat sat in a lock next to us.  He said that the boat spends most of its time "hauling anything and everything to Alaska and back."  The boat is big enough, though, to make several trips across the ocean.  "We'll go anywhere someone pays us to go," the crewman said.

Lisa and I paused for a few minutes to hear singers in the park at the locks.  We then headed for Sammamish to pick up all of Lisa's boys' shirts at the cleaners for a family picture tomorrow. We got caught in one of Seattle's notorious traffic jams and had to beg the dry cleaner to stay late for us!  We then spent the evening shopping and cooking for the family party after Spencer's homecoming talk.

Keeping Up with Mike

On Friday, July 18, 2015, Camille and her family headed north for a visit to Port Angelos and Victoria Island.  Jonny and Jenny stopped in Olympia on their way to Seattle.  Dave and Lisa went hiking along Lake Sammamish, after dropping the kids off at Lisa's home.  I grabbed the delightful, rare opportunity to tag along with Michael, as he checked out new and old favorite places in Seattle.  An absolute must was ordering the sampler of chowders at Pike Chowder, near Pike Market.  We each picked four of the eight chowders, and I could hardly bear not to choose all eight.  This time, I sampled smoked salmon chowder, chorizo and clam chowder, classic New England chowder, and lobster bisque. 

Seattle always has a liberal bent.  There were signs up, this trip, protesting the EU's crackdown on Greece's debt.  That is the issue of the moment, nationally and locally.

While I waited in the block-long line to get into Pike Chowder (with my Economist magazine), Michael searched for a gift for Heidi, who had to work rather than attend the reunion.  He found a specialty hat store across from Pike Market, and chose a wide-brimmed, ivory-colored straw hat for summer.

Next stop was Pioneer Square.  We learned the story of the huge totem pole on the square.  Early Seattle settlers stole it from a local Native American tribe.  When the original totem pole burned down, many years later, Seattle asked the tribe artists to carve another totem pole, and sent a check for $5,000.  "That was for the pole you stole," the tribe said, and cashed the check.  Seattle sent another $5,000 and got its second totem pole.

 Pioneer Square is a multi-ethnic area, and a great place to relax.

Glass-blowing is a common art in the Northwest, particularly in the Chihuly style shown below.  There were many glass galleries in the Pioneer Square area.  This one claimed to be one of the original glass-blowing studios in the city.

Neither Mike nor I had visited the Klondike Museum, which is a National Historical Park run by the National Parks Service.  The museum is housed in the Cadillac Building, built in the 1890s, when Seattle was the staging area for the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada.  We got lucky, and our visit coincided with the annual Klondike festival at the museum.  We watched a multi-media presentation, as a live actress told the story of a woman adventurer in the Klondike Gold Rush, with real photographs of the era projected on a screen behind her.

 

Outside, there were huskies, old time music, miners' food, a silent auction, and free Klondike brand ice cream sandwiches!

 We paused to talk with a ranger from Canada's Yukon.  She works at a Gold Rush museum in the Yukon and her husband mines for gold!

Mike and I finished the day's adventure with gourmet pizza at a shop identified for Jonny on one of his Bibles--Yelp, Trip Advisor, or Urban Spoon.  The shop just happened to be down the hill from Lisa's home in Sammamish.  Lisa and Kyle joined Jonny and Jenny, Sam, Mike, Dave, and me for one last meal and lots of hugs before everyone scattered.

Spendlove Reunion--Seabrook and Chainsaw Sculptures

 "More beaches, and close, but not in Ocean Shores."  That was our direction for activities on Thursday, July 16, 2015, the day before we all scattered for home.  We chose Seabrook, 45 minutes drive north, and its beach.  Seabrook is a planned beach community, five or ten years old, and almost too cute.  The homes fit well together, but each has a distinctive door, colors, siding, and/or roofing.  They meander around creeks and parks, and there are charming common areas, such as this playhouse made from a huge tree trunk.

 The flags were still out from the Fourth of July.

Next stop was the beach.  There were buckets and shovels, and even a boogie board, to borrow at one of the Seabrook shops.  Bryce and Mia made elaborate castles in the sand.

We adored the children who were with us at the reunion, and missed the ones who weren't.  Michael K was away at BYU-Idaho and Spencer will come home from his mission to California/Arcadia next week.  Annie and Sam must have been making sand castles when this photo was taken!

On our drive back to Ocean Shores, we stopped at a chainsaw sculpture store.  Our vacation to Ocean Shores in 1992 or 1993 coincided with the national championships for chainsaw sculpture-making.  It was a spectacle, with chainsaws roaring and logs quickly transformed into bears and werewolves.  This year we had to settle for just one store filled with that beloved art.  Yes, there was kitsch, but a charming variety.

 I guess big-busted women need a special sign to protect themselves!

 We even got to see the Creator of the store's treasures, working in the backyard with chainsaw and earphones.

 The dog of the day.

The kids got pizza as their parents gathered at Galway Bay, an Irish restaurant and pub, for a farewell dinner.