Seattle

I love it when Kevin has meetings in relatively nearby places and we can tag along. This time he had a meeting at Seattle Children's Hospital on Friday. It's near University of Washington and the girls and I hung out a pretty cool shopping area. We ate ice cream, drank coffee, wandered around and read our book. 

There was an amazing garden shop and I took lots of photos!

In the evening we headed to our hotel and then took a walk around the city. Seattle is different in so many ways than Portland, yet there are also similarities. It's a much bigger city, that's for sure.

We were expecting rain on Saturday, but instead it was pretty sunny most of the day. We took the ferry over to Bainbridge Island to explore. It was a short, 35 minute ride across the Puget Sound, leaving right from the heart of downtown Seattle.

Looking for ocean wildlife...she did spot two sea lions, but no whales.

On the way back we had great views of the city skyline....I love all the clouds.

The island is quite touristy with lots of little specialty shops (like Pentwater, MI). We checked out the farmer's market and decided there are a lot of hippie, granola-y, natural living people there. There was also some sort of frog art project thing because we saw several painted frogs around town, like this one.

When we returned to Seattle, we walked through Pikes Place because it was right there and it's what you do in Seattle. GORGEOUS flowers...I wanted to take pics of all of them, but I kept losing my family.

It was so crowded - not much fun when it's that crowded. In fact, Kevin and I both remarked that it felt like we were back in Thailand because of so many people on the streets and in the market.

There are usually several street performers and we stopped to watch this guy do his "slight of hand" tricks. He was good - really, really good!

Then we came home and I spent the night in the Emergency Department...but that's a different story for a different day.