Bellevue, Seattle and Home

Today we had a whirlwind tour of three gardens and the Space Needle. It had to be a whirlwind because the restaurant in the hotel only had two servers at breakfast. There are 56 people in our group and there were other hotel guests in the restaurant as well. Someone really dropped the ball in communicating the fact that all of us would want to use our complementary breakfast coupons and that we all had a deadline. Breakfast was so, so slow. One guy, who wasn’t in our group finally got up from his table saying he wasn’t a waiter, just a mortgage broker, but there must be something he could do. He rustled up a coffee pot and a pitcher of water and went around the dining room taking care of all the people who were waiting. Eventually, we all did get breakfast but we didn’t get out of the restaurant on time and that meant we had to shave time off of our tours today.

The gardens today were all beautiful. We scurried through the Bellevue Botanical Garden and then over to a beautiful Japanese Garden in Washington Park Arboretum. It is a beautiful garden- so well done. We went to another large Japanese garden in Portland last year. This one didn’t seem to be as large, but it was so nice. If we are ever in Seattle again, we will go back because we could have used more time there.

We had lunch in the Space Needle after that. A nice salad and Prime rib dinner. We had just enough time to go up to the top of the Space Needle and look around before we got back on the bus. Before we went to the airport we drove out to a Bonsai collection at the Weyerhaeuser headquarters and it was absolutely worth the drive. First, their headquarters building is pretty cool and set in a pretty, woodsy area. Second, the collection was the most beautiful collection of bonsai I have ever seen. Beautifully displayed and all of the bonsai were like works of art. There was no doubt they were all works of love.

We really lucked out with the weather on this trip. It was supposed to be cold and rainy every day. It was cold, but we had brought our big down jackets and the only times it rained, we were either in our hotels or on our bus. It never rained while we were out trying to see things.

I would like to go back again someday to see some of the gardens in mid-summer.






Here are some pictures. One is a view through the Japanese Garden. The others are of a few of the bonsai. One of them, the one with the big chunk of old bark as the base, is from a tree that was growing in the 1500s but the artist has only been working with it since 1986.

We had perfect weather today. It was cold and overcast when we got on the bus but the clouds burned off by the time we got to Butchart Gardens (the name is English, not french- pronounced butch-ert). We got there before very many people and really enjoyed our morning there. The last time I was there it was busy and crowded.

Butchart Gardens was built on the site of a cement quarry. The wife of the owner didn’t want to leave an ugly scar on the land and decided to plant a garden in the quarry. She had soil hauled in by horse drawn wagon and spent many years planning and planting the garden. She did quite a bit of the work herself, to the point of having the workers at the quarry and plant lower her over the edge in a sling or onto a scaffold to plant things in the crevasses and pockets of the quarry walls. This original section is know as the sunken garden and is spectacular. Over the many, many years since her original work, her descendants have continued to develop and care for the garden and there are many other areas of the garden surrounding and above the quarry. If you are ever in the Vancouver or Victoria Island area it is a “must see” attraction even if you aren’t a garden lover. Here are a few pictures: a small container next to a fountain, a small stream in the Japanese garden and part of the sunken garden.

We also had a really nice lunch catered by Butchart Gardens. Several different salads (so good!), pasta, chicken, salmon, potatoes and vegetables plus a yummy selection of sweets such as lemon or chocolate tarts, layered sponge cake, etc.

Can you tell I like Butchart Gardens?

After we left the gardens, we headed directly out to the BC Ferry to go back to the mainland and into the USA. A couple of interesting things happened on the ferry. First, we watched some bicyclists ride onto the ferry ahead of us. Then while we were on the ferry we looked out the window and saw something in the water. Lots of somethings. I was a really big group of either seals or sea lions swimming alongside the ferry going the opposite direction. Fun! Here is a picture of our ferry pulling up to the dock before we got on and a picture of the inside of the ferry by our bus.

The ferry is huge with room for rows and rows of buses and big rigs on the lower level and rows and rows and rows of cars on the level above that plus the 2 decks of seating and dining and shops above that. We lucked out on the ride back and Dad found four seats next to a big window, facing each other so that the four of us (Wally, Fran and us) could just sit and visit and look out the window.

When it was time to return to the bus we went back down and noticed that the cyclists were all there in front of our bus, ready to go. I stopped to talk to some of them and they said that they had come over to the Island on Tuesday, gone biking on the Island on Wednesday and now they were heading back. I asked if they had been really cold the whole time and they said it wasn’t bad because they were dressed for the weather (never broke above 50 degrees) and stayed in a condo at night. Here is a picture of the bikers and pedestrians getting ready to get off and of the two ladies I talked with. So nice.

Victoria

Today we took the BC Ferry to Vancouver Island and ate lunch at the Empress Hotel before we went to visit a tiny one-acre garden nestled in a residential neighborhood. Then we spent the rest of the day on our own with Wally and Fran, exploring the downtown and harbor area. We checked out a paper and stationary store, a chocolate shop, a Tilley store, a yarn store and then went to a nice restaurant for dinner before we walked along the inner harbor on our way to our hotel, the Royal Scot, just one street over from the harbor and a few yards from the provincial Parliament. It is easy to walk around the area because when you want to cross the street the cars stop for you.



Here are pictures of the inside of the ferry as we were leaving the bus to go up a few decks, the dining room at the Empress and pictures of a flower and a shrub bed at today’s garden.

Vancouver area

We have visited a few gardens today in the Vancouver City area. It was cold today, but it didn't rain in the afternoon like we expected it to. Here are a few pictures. Tomorrow we will take the ferry to spend time at a garden on Vancouver Island and then hang out in downtown Victoria during the afternoon. There are lots of interesting shops, historic buildings and museums, etc in downtown Victoria.

Tulips, eh?

Here we are in Canada. We flew in to Seattle at lunchtime and then drove out to the Skagit Valley to spend the afternoon looking at the tulip fields. Most of the Dutch bulbs that are sold in the U.S. are grown there, as are many of the fresh cut tulips used by florists. And yes, lots of Dutch tulip bulbs still come from Holland, too.

They also grow a lot of other things in the Skagit Valley. Tulips are grown on a 5-year rotation to prevent tulip diseases, so the valley is a patchwork of tulip fields and other crops that are grown in each field until they can grow tulips again.

Here are a couple of pictures from one of the tulip fields.

One more time-we hope!

We are home now and have had a chance to look at all the work that the painters did while we were gone. The colors are fine. As a matter of fact, we have decided we could have gone with even deeper colors.

I thought that the texturing looked awfully coarse, though, and that there were some distinct blobs of texture that were just begging grandkids to pick them off. I also noticed a few places where I thought the seams should have been done a little better. When someone from the company came over to take pcitures of the job, I showed him all those things and we also noticed a few other things that should have been done better. He decided that he needed to send a crew back out to work on some of the seams, fix a few spots and completely redo all the texture and repaint (at their expense).

I thought I had this all planned out so that we would be done before my "work season" and all of the traveling that we had planned. No such luck. Now they will have to work around my schedule to get things taken care of. So we will not be finishing things up any time soon. But once we do, it will be nice.

I think she'll still have frostbite!

Here we are in Sheboygan, next to Kohler (Wisconsin). Unlike Ann Arbor, this little area actually has some gentle, rolling hills instead of being flat. We have spent the day lovin' up the boys and just chillin' (in more ways than one- it's cold and rainy here). We'll have plenty of fun this weekend, though. We'll check out the new house and look around Kohler.

On another note, Steven called to let me know that the painters were really concerned, once they were done, about the color of paint I chose for my stairway walls. Sort of a "are you sure she meant to have a color so shockingly unattractive" concern. Not the kind of thing someone with paint-color insecurities wants to hear. It didn't look so bad when I put a couple of test patches on the walls. I guess we'll just have to see when we get home. In any case, it's just paint.

Dust

This is supposed to be the "big week"in the basement. Today they are going to texture the walls and they plan to paint on Tuesday and Wednesday. So today they have been sanding all the drywall to get it ready for the texture. The dust is pervasive! My cleaners came today and left at about 11:00 a.m. It is now 1:00 p.m. and there is a film of fine, white dust visible on everything upstairs. JJ left with a layer of white haze on his clothes. I have washed my hands several times and within 15 or 20 minutes they look dusty again. Only two more days to go and we will be done with the dirtiest part of the work!

We are going to take our time with the carpet, furniture and kitchenette. We know what we want to do, we just want to make sure we can pay cash for it, so we will have to see how much is left in savings once the paint dries. Another plus to waiting is that it will be warm enough to open the windows and air out the "new carpet" fumes. It is supposed to rain and snow and be cold off and on this week, so we will just have to put up with the paint fumes until we leave.

My goal is to have a nice place for Christmas Eve stories at the end of the year. We might even have a dinner or two down there. Michael and Tomoko have been really great to host all the family events each winter but I think they will be glad to relax a little more during the holidays.