2009 Minibreak Day Two
While the first day it was about doing everything on the list in order the second day was much more laid back. We didn’t really follow the clock at all.
The bath products smelling like tasty food made all of us pretty keen on eating once we left the hotel. After a wrong turn or two in the dim hope of stumbling upon an IHOP (as I hadn’t planned on going to one) we decided to just go to the Cheesecake Factory (which was the original plan). We all had some tasty food after a bit of a wait where I entertained the kid with my PDA. Knowing the Cheesecake Factory portions tend to me enormous and my unwavering desire for cheesecakes I just had appetizer nachos which I shared with the group and still couldn’t manage to finish. For dessert I decided to try something new and was very pleased to discover, although not much of a surprise, that the cookie dough cheesecake is fantastic. Not quite as good as my usual white chocolate raspberry but a runner up to that. Meanwhile we treated the kid to a goblet of strawberries and whip cream which he shared with his mom.
Then we went to Westlake Mall and took the monorail to Seattle Centre but the Space Needle had an enormous line-up. Well over an hour, if not two by the looks of it. All of us except the kid had done the needle enough times already that we were fine with skipping it, and as far as the kid goes he’d just as likely hate it or have a freak out so perhaps we dodged a bullet there. We were too far away from the Museum of Flight for it to be practical and the Science Centre also had a huge line-up. We played some arcade games, walked around, listened to a busker, let the kid run around a lot, got some free WiFi in the food court and then went back on the monorail. The kid had a blast on the monorail, he’s train-obsessed these days. Back at Westlake I bought a Barenaked Ladies CD I didn’t own for the trip back as we had burned through the 6 CDs we brought already.
Back on the road we decided to skip dinner entirely we were still so full from lunch. I was in the back seat and the stereo was oddly configured so I wasn’t actually able to hear any of my new CD but the kid was able to get a nap which was good. We made some excellent time and ended up at the Krispy Kreme before long, and before the kid was ready to end his nap but parking was enough to wake him up in a poor mood.
The border wait was nonexistent but that didn’t mean we had a smooth time crossing. Compared to the hassle we got with only having photocopies of the kid’s ID on the way down they seemed ready to make a federal case out of it on the way back. The guy was a bit of a jerk about it too, “photocopies are just pieces of paper, they’re as good as garbage – do you understand?” he said. I suppose “we require original documents so please bring those next time as you may have difficulty crossing otherwise” would have been too polite. It’s odd that the American border guards were far more polite than their Canadian counterpart who just seemed interested in rudely talking down to us. He seemed genuinely upset with us. I’m all for taking your job seriously but taking your job personally is something else entirely especially when we were apologetic and polite about the whole thing from beginning to end.
The rest of the trip home was uneventful, the kid saw a train, and we dropped Jon off at the ferry in time to catch an earlier sailing. The only weird thing was the amount of snow that had fallen in our absence. For all the weird weather we encountered on the trip from rain to snow to hail to sun within an hour’s drive it seemed like we had avoided the truly odd weather of serious snowfall in the second week of March back home.
