(UPDATE: We now have internet, so now we have pics!)

After spending a few days in downtown Seattle, we decided to mix things up and see other parts of the city and visit its surrounding areas. Woodinville which is a few miles north east of Seattle proper, is home to several wineries’ tasting rooms. We learned that the majority of the wine is actually grown on the other side of the Cascades in the eastern part of the state, but it seemed like they take advantage of the proximity to Seattle when they set-up a few blocks of small storefront tasting rooms in what was probably considered the countryside at one point.

We started at Columbia Winery which was by far the largest of the three we tasted that afternoon. It sits off the main road and has a large building with several tasting rooms and event space inside. Their outdoor courtyard was shady and overlooked their grounds. It was the ideal place toast my parents for their 53 years of wedded bliss. Even my dad who thinks “all wine tastes the same” enjoyed the setting and the tasting. 

After lunch we took a recommendation from one of the employees at Columbia and drove into the main square for a much smaller producer, Torri Mor Winery. They are actually an Oregon wine, but who are we to judge? We ended up lucking into having the place to ourselves. Which I feel like sometimes it means you get an extra taste or two, rarely a bad thing, especially when we felt like they had the best wines of the day. As an added bonus they are a small producer, so they can actually ship to Kentucky. So we’ll get to relive our Torri Mor experience when we get back home.

Earlier in our trip we ran into a family from the kids’ school who were in the middle of a five week trip across the west that mimicked many of our stops in National Parks. One of the Parks they had mentioned, which we hadn’t planned to visit at the time, was the North Cascades. After hearing them talk about it and reading up on the park in our trusty National Parks guide, we decided to work it in while my parents were in town. It’s about two and a half hours north east of Seattle, so we needed to get up and out super early to have enough time to spend in the park. 

Apparently our early start was too early for my mom and when we drove to their hotel she wasn’t feeling great and decided to sit the trip out. So with just Chuck in tow, we started out. 

Along the way we learned a few interesting facts. Despite being fairly close to Seattle, it’s shockingly one of the least visited of the National Parks. Depending on what you read, it comes in the bottom 6-10 as far as the number of visitors per year. The plus-side is after visiting Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier earlier, having smaller crowds with was very appealing. 

The other crazy stat on the Cascades, is it has over 300 glaciers within the park. That’s about 275 more than Glacier National Park which makes its low attendance even more baffling.

Since we had limited time that day, we had to hit the high points on our visit. Our favorites spot of the day, and the one that is at the top of most lists, is Diablo Lake. And for good reason. The glacier-fed lake is full of glacier flour (which we all learned from Maya’s earlier Park Ranger experience.) It means that the rocks which have been ground down by the slow moving glaciers over the centuries, create a ‘flour” that causes the water to look a crazy shade of translucent teal-blue. So blue it almost looks fake.

The surrounding namesake Cascade peaks made for a wonderful backdrop as we wound through the park. The hill-covered pine, countless lakes and the milky, glacier flour filled Thunder Creek were even more National Park eye candy. It’s also home to a few dams dating back to the 19-teens, whose hydroelectric power help keep Seattle’s lights on. The dams themselves were kind of cool, especially Ross Dam, which we were able to drive across, but the byproduct of the massive power lines running through the park was less than picturesque. It makes you wonder what the fate of the land would have been if it didn’t get its National Park protection?

Keeping with our nature theme, the next day we all headed to the Bellevue Botanical Garden. My mom, who is a proud member of a garden club, Nikki, who’s a garden- and flower-junkie, and Maya who’s a flower-lover-in-training, were particularly excited. The gardens covered over 50 meticulously maintained acres and had a wide range of local plants and flowers. From a traditional Japanese garden (complete with a pagoda and water features), an old growth redwood forest accessed via a suspension bridge to countless flowers in full bloom, it was a great way to spend our afternoon. 

The last full day with my parents we had planned on having them join us in Vancouver, but thanks to our charger/converter going bad on the Airstream, we had to visit our 3rd Airstream service department on this trip. (Which makes us wonder, will we see more National Parks on this trip or Airstream service departments???) Instead we worked on a plan for them to spend that day and night at Mt Rainer before flying home the following morning. In hindsight it ended up being a good call; Friday traffic out of Seattle was crushing to say the least. What should have been a two and a half hour drive to Vancouver took us over five hours, the first three being within Seattle’s metropolitan area. We loved our time in Seattle, but that traffic….whoa.

Despite the ending, being able to see my parents for a week was fantastic. No doubt I lucked into a couple of great ones. At times we worried our hectic pace might have run them ragged but they kept-up with us from destination to destination without skipping a beat. It was fun exploring a new city with them. The only two people who might have enjoyed their visit more, were the kids. A night didn’t go by when one, or both of the kids, slept in their spare bed at the hotel. A week of “Mimi and Papaw” made their time in Seattle even better.