We went sledding with the Wright's on Tuesday. Kyle and Mark have the week off from work so Shannon and I had talked about doing this together. We went up to Hyak Snow Park up by Snoqualmie Pass. It was lightly snowing, but good weather. The sledding hill changed from last time we went. They don't have a big open hill anymore, they had 3 different sledding lanes so you had to wait in lines to go down. At first, it was really busy and the lines were long, but then soon people started spreading out to other areas and so the lines weren't as bad. The kids found a hill off to the side of the big sledding hill and it had a little jump so they had more fun doing that.
The next day we went to downtown Seattle with the Wright's as well to see the gingerbread houses at the Sheraton Hotel. We were going to go together to visit this before Christmas, but never got around to doing it so now we were doing all our activities on back to back days with each other. Funny.
I love my kids' cooperation with pictures. Priceless.
The theme was Star Wars so all the gingerbread structures were from Star Wars scenes. I am not familiar with Star Wars so I probably didn't appreciate them as much as other people would. They looked cool. I just thought they would be in a different room and there would be more of them. But there were only 6 of them in the lobby and they were a lot bigger than I thought. So it was funny comparing my expectations to the real thing. The good thing about going after Christmas was that the line wasn't long. Mark said last year the lines were horrible. Good to remember.
Next we walked to the nearby mall where they have a carousal and we let the kids go for a ride.
After that, we were going to eat lunch at the food court at the mall, but the food options were weird. Not kid friendly. So then we talked about getting on the monorail and going to the Seattle Center and eating at the McDonald's there. Well they only take cash and neither of us had cash. Kyle and Mark went to the ATM in the mall and it was broken. They tried going downstairs, but the escalator was broken and the elevator was full. When they came back to tell us it was just ridiculous. Funny really. Westlake Center Mall failed that day. So I asked where a McDonald's was nearby and it was just a block away. So we left the mall and went to the McDonald's to eat. After leaving McDonald's, we saw a Bank of America ATM across the street. Perfect. We decided to go back and take the monorail to the Seattle Center (Kyle and I had never been on it so I was excited to try it out.). We had 2+ hours to waste before our parking expired so we thought why not. The play area at the Seattle Center was busier than we though it would be, but the kids had fun with it and we enjoyed the sun because it was so cold. We went back to the mall then walked a few blocks to Pikes Place. Their kids had never been there before so we were trying to squeeze it in, but it was too busy. Mark and Shannon said they could come back. We saw the gum wall, the pig and left. We got some mini donuts at a stand on our way back to the car. We were going to get them at Pike's Place, but the line was forever long and we said forget it. Even with all the stressful moments of trying to make decisions, we all had a good time and are glad we did it.
