West Coast Adventures – Part 2

I am feeling quite sad to be writing my last trip re-cap, as it was such a wonderful vacation. However, I am also excited to start writing about what we’ve been up to since our trip. I can’t believe we got back a month ago today!

Anyway, I left off the last post (West Coast Adventures – Part 1) on the Sunday evening when we were just on our way back to Bainbridge Island after a few days in the San Juan Islands, Bellingham, and Vancouver. At that point, we had two full days plus an extra half day left, and we were looking forward to spending that time together and doing some more exploring around Seattle and Bainbridge Island.

On the Monday, we had a nice relaxing morning and spent some time enjoying the sunshine in Grandma’s beautiful garden.

And then we went into town and wandered around the shops and picked up a few souvenirs. Ben and I went for a run in the evening and then we all had a wonderful dinner at Aunt Jane and Uncle Steve’s.

Tuesday we went into Seattle for the day, and started off at Pike Place Market, which I always love to visit.

After the market and some wandering around downtown, we headed to Ballard Locks, which I had never been to before. These locks are the gateway between the freshwater lakes, Lake Union and Lake Washington, and Puget Sound, and the locks allow boats to go through, and there are also fish ladders to allow the salmon to carry out their normal migration patterns.

It was a beautiful day to walk around and take in the views…

And there was a really cool area where you could go underground and look through glass to see the salmon swimming up the fish ladders.

I had no idea how much thought had to go into creating fish ladders, and it was fascinating to learn more.

After touring the locks for a while, we were hungry, and I had been hoping to try out a restaurant called Chaco Canyon Organic Cafe that I had read about on one of my favorite food blogs, Daily Garnish.

Mom, Aunt Jane, Dad, and Ben kindly obliged me in trying this place out, and I was not disappointed! Luckily, I don’t think anyone else was either. It was a really cool, forward-thinking cafe which served delicious, organic food at very reasonable prices, and was clearly very committed to social and environmental issues.

Just thinking about this place makes my mouth water. I wish we had something like this near us.

After a late lunch, we realised that if we wanted time to spend with Grandma and Uncle Steve in the evening, we better head back to the ferry to get back to Bainbridge.

We got there at the perfect time again, and managed to get a few pictures taken before we loaded up on the boat.

It was another beautiful ferry ride across, and time to start saying our goodbyes to Seattle.

We had another wonderful evening, and managed to get some family photos.

Unfortunately, my aunt and uncle’s dog, Emma, was not very cooperative for the photos.

It was very hard to leave the next day, not only because we had such a wonderful visit and would miss Aunt Jane, Uncle Steve, Grandma, and Seattle, but also because it meant the end of a wonderful three weeks hanging out with my parents. I got totally spoiled by having such a nice long visit with them, and it just made saying goodbye even harder.

We are already looking forward to our next trip, and very grateful to my parents and everyone else who helped make it possible and helped make it so much fun!