Anna Comes to Town, Part 2

Sunday: Ballard Locks & Salmon Ladder

We continued our adventures with Anna on Sunday evening with going to the Ballard Locks again and a walk through the Botanical Garden. Fortunately, no torrential downpour this time. Two highlights: 1) there are two locks – one is smaller and gets used all the time, one is really big and you don’t see ships in there nearly as often. We were watching the boats in the smaller locks and turned around to see a HUGE barge right behind us in the big one. I think a lot of people were so busy watching the smaller one that they didn’t even notice the big one going through. We think it might have been the barge they used a few days later to light off fireworks on Lake Union. There is a train bridge just past the locks, so we got to see them open up the train bridge for the barge to pass through. 2) I was watching the fish ladder, and it’s kind of hard to see the fish as they go up over a wall because they are still mostly underwater – so I was staring at them intently when all of a sudden a seal’s face popped up out of the water staring right at me – I totally jumped and let out a little yelp! I think I scared him too because he went back under – we saw him swim over the fish ladder wall but he didn’t resurface after that. It’s probably a pretty good place for a hungry seal to find a meal!

        

We found these flowers in the botanical garden – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like them!

 

Monday: Snoqualmie Falls, Seattle Public Library, and Mariners Game

thanks Anna for the fun pictures of me with the boys!

The Library: Very interesting architecture and design. Some highlights: the red room (EVERYTHING is red – floor, ceiling, walls, etc. It’s supposed to represent the “heart” of the library). The spiral ramp – you start on the 6th floor and can walk on a slowly escalating ramp all the way up to the 10th – this way you can follow the Dewey decimal system all the way through without going up or down stairs or escalators. Oh, and PS, the escalators, and elevators, are fluorescent green.

    

After our trip to the library, Nate met up with us at Pioneer Square to head down to the Mariners Game. It was really fun – Ryan was pretty wiggly at first and wanted to walk around, but eventually got tired and was happy to sit on our laps for the most part. Bennett loved the game – we picked up a little folded game schedule for him and he loved it – by the end of the game, he was exhausted too and just sat there staring, holding tight to his little schedule. Ryan fell asleep as we were sitting at the end of the game – Bennett fell asleep in Nate’s arms on the way to the bus and stayed asleep until we got home. It was a fun game – the Mariners pulled ahead in the 7th (maybe 8th) inning with back to back home runs and ended up winning. The stadium is great – it was raining, so the roof was closed, but you could still see out to the city.

        

Thanks for coming to visit Anna!! It was so fun to have you here!