As you can see above, we made it out of the snowy campsite from last night, but it wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. When I saw the truck “rip” up the hill with their chains on I had my suspicion that I’d need the same assistance this morning to extract ourselves as well. Sure enough, I took a couple tries on each exit route to no avail, the roads were too steep and the snow too slippery to get out without
chains. No worries, that’s why we have them. So leaving a slightly nervous Jen in the van with the kids, I hoped out and threw the chains on the back. It still wasn’t “easy”, but we made it up the road and out of the winter wonderland.
Our destination for the day was Seattle, we looked up what our options were our membership perk of being an OMSI member (thanks mom!) via their list: https://omsi.edu/sites/default/files/u1546/FINAL_ASTCTravelPassport_12pt_May-Oct2018.pdf We had a few options, but ultimately decided on The Museum of Flight which was a great choice and although the employee we chatted up in the parking lot commented that we had 4 hours to get through it and it would be enough time, I thought, Yeah right, maybe an hour or two for our attentions. We did have lunch inside, but in the end spent the better part of 3 hours wondering around and inside airplanes.
There’s a big gallery with a historical account of aviation and military aircraft and a space exhibit which unfortunately wasn’t ready yet. Then we had lunch in their cafe to fill our tanks and replenish the kid’s attention spans. After lunch we made the chilly walk across the sky walk bridge and went through the hanger where you can walk through 5 airplanes (concord, 727, 747, 787, and Air force one). We were all pretty exhausted after this museum and though we should have known better and just headed for our parking spot for the night (Mercer Island) we somewhat foolishly (mostly just optimistically) headed to Pike’s Place Fish Market to find flowers (Amelia wanted to get some for mom) and Honey sticks. By the time we found a place to park the van on the street (the signage for street parking was incredibly confusing and the van isn’t going to fit in any garage we saw) we headed to the market to find them all shut up. We were happy to find a honey shop on the upper level still open and got the honey sticks taken care of, but flowers were going to have to wait. We also stopped into Starbucks (we were in Seattle) to grab a cup of joe off the gift cards we’d gotten for Christmas (Thanks Aunt Jean and MIL), the coffee took too long and we did have some lapses in emotional stability, mostly me. We made it back to the van with hot coffee in hand and pulled directions up for our site for the night. We tucked in near a park on Mercer Island and settled in for the night.