If you ever come visit me, I will spend a lot of time trying to feed you, as witnessed in my previous post chronicling the many meals that Justin, Mike and I consumed during Justin’s recent trip to Seattle.  But there are other things to do with me besides having me shove food down your throat.  Thankfully, Justin was a good sport and we actually got the chance to see quite a few things in the city.

I’ve already chronicled Friday and Saturday.  On Sunday, the boys spent the first half of the day at the Colonade riding their bikes off of giant ramps and boulders and other dangerous things.  Hopefully Mike will post some pictures of their awesomeness soon.

When they got back, we continued the generally sporty theme of the day by checking out the flagship REI store.  It’s just so…  big.  Here we marvelled at kayaks, bike racks and some very involved baby-backpacks.  Justin and I decided that we are organizing an epic camping trip as soon as the weather warms up again, and Mike kept talking about how he needs to buy the WASP knife before we go to protect us all from bears:

After REI we drove to the Capitol Hill neighborhood and climbed the Volunteer Park Water Tower. Justin used his schmancy new camera to take some pretty pictures of the cityscape, while Mike, obviously exhausted from the stair climb, did this:

On Monday, when Mike went to work Justin and I hopped on our bikes and rode to check out the Ballard Locks.  This was very exciting, because every time I had asked Justin what he wanted to see in Seattle, his only answer was “Salmon.”  So here, we saw salmon.

We also saw seals (eating the salmon) and a very big boat come through the Locks!  You can tell that Justin really is an engineer by how incredibly fascinated he was by this process:

On our ride home, the gray-but-dry weather turned into a torrential downpour.  We kept joking that this was his “iconically Seattle” experience of the week.  This is what we looked like by the time we got home:

On Tuesday the weather was much better, so we checked out Kerry Park, did the Seattle Underground Tour (we had to do something super-touristy before he left), and finished off the daylight with a hike through Discovery Park:

On Tuesday morning, we bid adieu to our awesome friend.  We were sad to see him go, but we hope he has a good time visiting Portland!  Justin, you (and your bike) were definitely the best guest(s) we’ve ever had in Seattle!

He carries a really big purse.

Since we’ve moved to Seattle, I’ve been cooking up a storm.  Not a perfect storm, but a storm nonetheless.  In fact, I’ve been cooking so much that we’ve cut our usually frequent habit of eating out down to once or twice a week.  It’s generally a good thing- my food has gotten better and it is much cheaper.

However, since our friend Justin came to visit us last Thursday, all that has gone out the window.

Having somebody from back home visit us has been an excuse to try all kinds of deliciousness that we’ve put off in the past couple of months, as well as revisit a few favorites.  It’s been fun, because as Justin and I have discussed at length, food up here is awesome.  We can’t figure out if it’s the general lack of chain restaurants or the general emphasis on quality ingredients, but there is definitely something wonderful about eating in Seattle.  Here is a summary of what we’ve devoured since Justin arrived:

• Dinner at Peso’s: This Mexican/tapas place is down the hill from us.  It’s a little clubby/yuppie feeling, but they have a great late-night happy hour.  We dug the crab cakes and sangria.  Yum.
• Beecher’s Handmade Cheese: Best Mac and Cheese I’ve ever had.  And I love cheese.
• Ramen at Boom Noodle: Ramen + Happy Hour = delicious.
• Dinner at Flying Fish: Good seafood, great wine.  Mike had a black coconut risotto that I wanted to crawl inside of and eat my way out of.
• Pho Viet Anh: Our new pho place.
• Dad Watson’s: I didn’t love my Mac and Cheese here, but Justin liked his stuffed burger so much that we took a picture of it:

• Thai Kitchen in Queen Anne:  Everybody loved the Panang Curry.  This was a fortunate accident, since we had originally intended to go to a different Thai restaurant near our house, but they closed early.  Bad for them, good for us.  I think this is when Mike first declared that he could eat Thai food every day if he had to.
• MAD Pizza: We wandered in here on a whim before exploring the giant REI.  The pizza was good, but the so-called “half salads” were even better.  A pleasant surprise.
• Chinoise Cafe: This is an odd little restaurant that has a little bit of every kind of Asian cuisine.  If you can’t decide what you want to eat, you can come here, have a bowl of pho, some fried rice, walnut shrimp and a side of kim chi and be incredibly happy.  When the bill came, we were all pleasantly surprised at how little it cost.  This is the kind of restaurant you would want right by your house.  In our case, it is right by our house.  Awesome.
• The Other Coast Cafe: Justin said this was the best hot sandwhich he had ever had.  Enough said.
• Phuket: Yes, more Thai food.  We can’t help it, there is a glut of Thai food in this city.  Mike loves this place because the Pad Thai isn’t too sweet.
• Skillet Street Food: I was sooo excited to finally eat at this roving gourmet food truck.  Best french fries I’ve ever had, plus everything was really reasonably price.
• Ivar’s Salmon House: Eh, this was a little disapointing, especially because it was our last meal together before Justin goes home tomorrow.  The highlight of the meal was when we found out that Mike, not wanting to offend our waiter, had tried to hide all of the fish and chips that he didn’t eat:

This is one of the reasons I love him.  Weirdo.

Mike and I have extremely different philosophies when it comes to travel and vacation.  I generally want to research and plan every possible split second available, and Mike wants to show up somewhere and just see what happens.  These differences are apparent not only in our own travels, but they also seem to materialize when other people come to visit us.  Poor Justin spent Saturday experiencing what happens when our worlds collide: we crammed a full day of activities into the first half of Saturday, and then we spent the other half being as lazy as possible.

Saturday started off with a monumentous occasion- a trip to OfficeMax, where Justin bought his FIRST DIGITAL CAMERA.  Yes, you read that correctly- it’s 2008, Justin is a 26 year old successful engineer, and he has never owned a digital camera before.

After the major electronics purchase, we had some really good pho at Pho Viet Anh, which was exciting because a) good pho is always a good thing, and b) it’s only a mile from our house- we have a local Vietnamese restaurant now!   This is some kind of milestone.  After we were full of noodle goodness, we made it to our first planned destination of the day: BrickCon.

What?  You’ve never heard of BrickCon, the premiere Lego(R) Fan Convention in the continental US?  Then you must be a loser.  I don’t know what you were doing Saturday at noon, but we saw stuff like this:

An actual Lego(R) Ambassador;

Legoville, USA;

A Halo Army (from the video game, Mike had to explain this to me);

Lego-fied art;

A model of the Titanic that was so big that we couldn’t get the entire thing in one shot.  And it was for sale, price upon request only.

After we had our fill of BrickCon, we headed downtown to the Seattle Aquarium.

We saw a gigantic octopus and watched it change colors.  I love that it got paler when it got closer to me.

Justin poked an anenome.

We hung out in the aquarium-dome.

And we saw the otters!  I LOVE otters!

The aquarium was even cooler thanks to Mike’s hefty Microsoft Employee discount.  It saved us more than 50%!  Score.

The rest of Saturday was spent visiting the world’s tiniest bike shop, eating a very late lunch, and then heading back to the house, where I took a nap.  Saturday had officially worn me out by 5:00 PM.  I must be getting old.

This Thursday night we got our first official visitor from back home- our friend Justin flew in Thursday night, giving us the chance to hang out with an old friend, flex our hosting skills, and finally start knocking a few “touristy” things off our list of to-dos.  Yay Justin!

I took this picture as he was loading his bike into Mike’s car at the airport.  Yes, Justin is so hard core that he travels with his bike.

Mike worked on Friday, leaving me to do the entertaining.  We scoped out Pike’s Place Market, ate some Macaroni and Cheese at Beecher’s, which was so delicious and filling that half a cup of the stuff kept us full for about 5 hours, and then took the longest walk ever in the rain.  We walked so much that we were sore the next day, which is saying a lot, because Justin is the most athletic person I know.  After all that wandering, we came back to the house, where Justin rode his bike down and up Queen Anne Hill in the rain to get some bike parts, and then fixed Mike’s bike.  We munched on some ramen from Boom Noodle (just in time for their happy hour specials, score!) and walked around the Capitol Hill Neighborhood, where I got a parking ticket because I simply forgot to pay for parking (you can take the girl out of the suburbs…) and we laughed about how Mike might have died if we had ended up living in a part of the city that actually looked like a city.

Of course, I forgot my camera the entire day, so I don’t have pictures of any of the cool stuff we saw.

We ended the day with a night-time pit stop at the Colonade Bike Park (so the boys could plan for their biking adventure later this weekend) and a delicious dinner at Flying Fish in Belltown.  More adventures and touristy goodness to come…

(Disclaimer: I hate picture-less posts, but this is one.  I suck.)

This weekend was quickly devoured by a last-minute trip to Orange County.  It was a bit hectic, but even a hectic trip that involves seeing some of my favorite people in the world is one of my favorite ways to spend a weekend.

Since everything was so last minute, there were a couple things that I didn’t end up accomplishing.  I had planned on spending most of Friday baking some goodies for a bake sale organized by the Capitol Hill Knitting Group here in Seattle to benefit the Obama Campaign, but packing and cleaning devoured my day and I ended up just donating napkins and trashbags.  Definately not as delicious, but useful nonetheless.  (For those wondering, the bake sale was a success!  The group raised over $400!)

The trip didn’t start off great.  We had different flights on different airlines: Mike was flying on Virgin America while I was on Southwest.  Needless to say, I was jealous.  It turned out that I didn’t need to be though, because his flight ended up getting delayed over an hour AND the RED system crashed as soon as the plane took off, so he didn’t even get to take advantage of the free TV, movies and games.  Boo.

Eventually, he landed, we met up, and our friend Justin was kind enough to pick us up, even though we had flown into LAX at 11:30 PM.  Thank you Justin!  We can’t wait til you come up to visit in a few weeks!

Even though we were tired, we decided to stop by our old house to say hi to our friends/best tenants ever, Derek, Ben and Jimmy, who share the house along with Justin.  Seriously, our house could not be left in better hands.  What was supposed to be a quick hello turned into us staying til 1:30 AM playing Castle Crashers with Ben.  If you have XBox Live, you should download this immediately.  Pure cartoon-y princess-saving bliss.

Eventually though, we were completely exhausted, so we headed to my parents’ house, where we stayed for the weekend, and passed out immediately.  It was a tiring but entertaining start to an equally exhausting but good-to-be-home trip.  I’ll continue with more entertaining recaps of Saturday and Sunday tomorrow, when I’m a bit more well-rested.