Trip to Seattle: Day Three

It's Seattle, what did you expect?
Ultimate Seattle:
Seattle's Museum of Flight

Eustache in the cockpit of Concorde; the tail of Air Force One (the one Nixon went to China with); Eustache at Air Force's one door, with Concorde in the background.
Kids in outer space.

Trip to Seattle: Day Two

Walking through the city:


Boarding the Bainbridge Island Ferry:


The family:


Lunch by the water (Eustache took the picture on the middle of the bottom row, and Aéma the one at the bottom right corner):


Hanging out in Bainbridge Island. The trip is worth it just for Mora Iced Creamery. The KiDiMu (kids discovery museum) is cute but smallish. The parks are relaxing and pretty.


Pacific Northwest landscape:


Pooped on the way back to the hotel.

Trip to Seattle: Day One

Taking BART:


At SFO and in our plane:


At Sea-Tac airport:


And we reached the target!

Happy in the Kitchen

8/16/2008.

Dinner at Hamano

8/13/08. Not particularly great pictures, but the only ones I have. Hamano was not as welcoming as usual and they totally freaked about the kids, who were not particularly misbehaved.

Eustache's Graduation Party

08/10/2008. Eustache did not graduate, but that was the marketing angle for a party with his schoolmate from the school he left last month. Party was at Douglass Park.

Eustache was so busy playing (which today meant digging gopher holes) that there's no picture of the party boy, even though he insisted on wearing a buttoned shirt for the occasion. His favorite special occasion shirt.

The background of the picture above is a chocolate cake which I made and deserves its own picture:


It's rather time-consuming labor-intensive to make, but the result ended up pretty darn amazing. Recipe here. If you have 3 hours to spend, well worth the effort.

You can reserve a picnic table at Douglass Park, but we were too late doing so. You can also bring your own table, it's a public park after all and you don't need a permit if your party is not so large, but you may run into the ire of a deluded lady who convinced herself she had rented the whole park for her private party. She eventually apologized, but not the best way to start the day.

Triplets

08/10/2008. These pictures are not staged.

North Fork of the American River

Off Iowa Hill road (exit Highway 80 at Colfax), a very scenic spot to take a dip. There's a day use area ($5/vehicle) which conveniently happened to be full when we were there, forcing us to park off the road instead. River water was very shallow, with deeper spots here and there, no currents, and warm water. A great find!

Camping there is first come first serve per Auburn Recreation Area web page.

Sugar Pine Reservoir

We camped on 8/2/08-8/3/08 at Shirttail Creek campground, next to the Sugar Pine reservoir. It's a very scenic lake. There's a boat launch ramp, but only small fishing watercraft, so no noisy annoying water skiing.



The warm water was ideal for a little dip in the evening when we arrived there around 6:30pm, after our stop in Sacto.



Aéma looks unhappy, but it was only a transient phase. She happily splashed in the water the day after.


David cooked up a storm, including bbq'ed salmon and breakfast chocolate crepes. Guess which one Eustache and Aéma liked best?



We spent Sunday morning roasting on the sun. It was actually a bit chilly when the breeze was blowing, but tons of fun anyway.


To reserve again, here. It would be a good idea to go back there, it was the best camping spot so far.

Sacramento

Old Town Sacramento (08/02/2008). Decent burger and fish and chips right by the train tracks.



Railroad Museum:




Railroad Museum info here. Open every day 10am-5pm. Free for kids under 6.

Kite Festival in Berkeley

7/26/2008. Pretty kites and all, but hardly worth the pain with the traffic (they closed the Berkeley Marina access road and had pain-in-the-butt police to manage traffic in the worst possible way).

Feeding Augustin.

It takes an expert to feed the baby. 7/23/2008.