We made yet another trip to REI in Seattle. That store is so much fun! It’s probably my favorite place to shop and drool over cool outdoor stuff. They were having an outdoor event on their huge patio on the second floor and there was lots of food, drinks, and music. I tried a caribou hotdog (from Alaska)! It was actually pretty good!
We then took the kids to Schmitz Park on Alki point to hike around for a bit. We had planned to go kayaking initially, but waited until later in the afternoon when the sun was lower in the sky.
Schmitz Park was pretty awesome for being right in town. The red pin below shows where it is located:
It was good to let the kids run around.
Really neat tree trunk painted to look like an alligator…
Avin trying to move a small tree:
Also, on our way to Alki point, we stopped by for a picture of the Seattle skyline, and it was cool to see that our cruise ship is currently docked! We get to hop on that awesome ship next weekend and head to Alaska!
We then headed to the Arboretum. Parking was terrible!! There were only a handful of spots in the area closest to where we could launch the kayaks, and it was a miniature parking lot. People continually came down in there and had to back up several times just to turn around and get out. We were lucky enough to find a spot to park the Jeep after we unloaded the kayaks.
In the photo below, most of the cars on the left side were illegally parked and had tickets on the windshield. You had to wait for a spot on the right side to open up. We parked illegally by the trailhead (where I’m standing in the photo below) just long enough to unload the boats and then a spot in the right side opened up.
The kayak dolly really came in handy today. It was quite a hill going down to the water from the parking lot.
Tripp was glad to have his own cock pit in the new kayak.
The blue dot shows where we were located in the image below. We pretty much had to stick to the little waterways you see and couldn’t go under that bridge. Unfortunately, due to work being done on the bridge, they built a barricade to prevent people from kayaking from the Arboretum into Lake Washington. At the other end, the water level was too low to kayak. We were pretty confined with where we could go, which was a little frustrating, but the kids had a great time! Some people were hiking their kayaks up and over the temporary barrier that was constructed in the water underneath the bridge, but our boats are kind of heavy and we figured there was probably a good reason they didn’t want people kayaking under a construction area!!
I love the duck making a beeline for our kayak, hoping for some food:
Carla said the blue tandem kayak is SO much easier to keep straight then the orange one, which we figured would be the case.
The kids really wanted to feed the ducks, so we let them throw a couple of wafers into the water. Wellll, one duck decided to stay with us the entire time (the kids named him Frank) and sometimes would get too close for comfort for Tripp! Frank almost jumped into the boat one time!
I’m glad they got to play with their remote controlled boats grandma and grandpa got them over a year ago. I meant to get these out of the kayak when we were paddling around, and forgot. Next time!
Sooo…when we launched our kayaks, I had forgotten to put my iPhone into a waterproof pouch. I was careful and did OK until the very end… When I stood up to get out of the kayak (about knee-deep in the water still), it fell out of my lap and into the water! AHHHHHH!!! All of my pictures and videos and my awesome battery case, sitting somewhere in the water, and I didn’t know exactly where! I didn’t even realize it happened until I reach for it to take a picture of the kids played with their boats. Now, I know the iPhone 7 is supposed to be waterproof from the factory, but I wasn’t sure about my battery case. I didn’t realize it had happened until we had the kayaks most of the way up on the shore. The water gets very murky when you walk around in it, so Carla and I were frantically feeling around in the water. The more we moved around and felt the bottom with our hands, the more we stirred up the mud. Not being able to see the ground we were walking on, I was worried we would step on it and crack it. We looked pretty ridiculous out there! And we kept having to tell the kids to keep the remote control boats out of our way!! Can you feel our frustration?
We decided to move the boats completely onto the shore and start feeling the water from the shoreline outward, and in about 10 seconds Carla found it!! And it was working just fine! Whew!!!!
We then headed back to the RV park. We are changing sites tomorrow (only three sites down from where we are now) as part of our RV site hopping we have to do once in a while, since they didn’t have a consecutive block of dates open for the same site for the entire month we are here. We went ahead and booked two months here next summer (mid-July to mid-September) so we can stay in the same spot the whole time.