Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Seattle/Vancouver Trip

If you go with us to a new place, you will soon discover, as Megan did this trip, that we're all about the food.
Sight-seeing? Oh, sure. We do some of that. But the food, the local cuisine, is what we're all about. For that very reason, it would seem that most of the pictures I took are of the things we ate.

After 12ish hours in the car, we arrived in Seattle on Friday afternoon. We dropped our stuff off at the hotel and headed downtown to see the sights. We ate dinner at a local pizza place called Belltown Pizza. Surprisingly, I forgot to take a picture of our food there, but it was good.

After dinner we walked along the piers before we took a ferry over to Bainbridge Island...just because we thought it would be fun to ride a ferry. (That is part of Bainbridge Island behind us.)

Here we have Matt showing off the view of the Seattle skyline from inside the ferry. It was a little rainy, so it wasn't very fun to be out on the deck.

Saturday morning we headed up to Vancouver. Our first stop was the LDS temple open house in Langley. We took a few pictures before we left, but they're all on Megan's camera, so I guess you'll have to wait a little longer to see those. By the afternoon we headed to Stanley Park and Robson street, which, according to our research, are some of the must-see places of Vancouver.
Robson street had just what we were looking for: restaurants and shopping. We didn't do any shopping since everything is ridiculously expensive in Canada, but we did do some eating. We had lunch earlier in the day at an A&W/Chubby Chicken (not very Canadian), where Matt sampled poutine.

I took the picture after he had eaten about half of it, but it didn't look that great to begin with. It consists of french fries, gravy, and cheese curds. It is so popular, and so common, that we also saw it on the menu at Costco.

This was our "dinner" on Robson street at the Crepe Cafe. Megan got hers with applesauce, cinnamon, and whipped cream; Matt got Nutella, bananas, and walnuts; and I got mine with dark chocolate and strawberries. Amazing.

We drove back to Seattle that night, then got up Sunday morning to spend a good part of the day in Seattle before starting our drive back that afternoon. We first went on a tour of the Boeing factory in Everett, WA. That was definitely one of the coolest parts of the trip, but no pictures because electronic devices were not allowed on the tour.

After Boeing, we stopped by Ivar's Seafood so Matt could have some Seattle fish & chips. Megan and I opted not to try any.

And then the rest of our time in Seattle was spent at the Space Needle and Pike Place Market.

This the only picture of Pike Place Market I took. This is only a fraction of the gazillion tulips they had there. If they wouldn't have had to sit in a car for the next day and a half we totally would have bought some!

We finally started our trip back late that afternoon, and once we were a little ways outside the city we stopped to get gas and dinner. The Fat Burger we ate at was right next to a Kool Kreme. I'd never considered the concept, but donuts and ice cream are an amazing combination! This shop had extraordinary krispy kremes including chocolate and maple bars, doughnut sundaes, and this creme filled chocolate doughnut.

We are now fans of Seattle, Vancouver, and Kool Kreme. All in all, not a bad trip!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

More Baby News

I fully believe that "it's not what you know, it's who you know," because although I'm only 16 weeks pregnant and should have had to wait another month for an ultrasound to find out if we're having a boy or girl, I know this awesome person named Hillary.

Hillary works at a medical clinic and happens to be really good friends with an amazing ultrasound tech, so she invited me to come in for a sneak-peek. The only other ultrasound we've had was at 9 weeks (the picture I included in the last post), and there was a world of difference in the baby we saw. This time it was moving all over the place and looked like a baby rather than a peanut!

It was through that movement that we were able to get several shots of good evidence that it's a boy. It was at that point that Matt leaned over to me and, in a very serious voice, said, "That's awesome." He's already planning the first tool set he's going to buy him :)

We're both extremely excited. In fact, I've noticed that neither of us have really stopped smiling since we found out yesterday. I'll have to put aside all of my ideas for little girl dresses and bows for now--instead I'll just have to be on the lookout for more "masculine" baby craft projects!