Trip to Bellingham: Day 3

On our final day of our vacation to Bellingham, it came time for the main event, the baby blessing. I'm not a very religious person at least not any more... but on the rare occasion I can muster up the courage to sit in on a service, usually for family related activities. I wasn't raised Mormon but have become somewhat familiar with the customs as Rachel's side of the family are Mormon. They're at church for a few hours but Rachel, Liz (her sister) and I only planned to stay for the first hour which is when the baby blessing was to be done. After the ceremony we went back to the hotel to change and then drove up into downtown Bellingham which was really cute and quaint to have some breakfast. We found a diner with a very peculiar waiter helping us. The food was really good and the pancakes were humongous but the guy was continually sniffing during the time that we were there. We were convinced he was definitely high on something but he was a really good waiter despite his peculiar behavior. Afterward, we went back to the hotel to wait for everyone to get back from church. When everyone returned we went over to Michelle's parents hotel to get the party started for the baby blessing. We had to wait in the hall for a bit because they were not there yet and we were locked out of the conference room. Everyone finally arrived and we had pulled pork sandwiches for lunch and played games, including my virginal experience with the game Skip-Bo in which I won the first game, and we had an Easter egg hunt for the kids. Afterwards we went back to hotel to rest and wake up early for our flight in the morning. It was a really good trip and we all had a lot of fun. I'm excited for our next family vacation in August. We are all going on a Mexican cruise!!

Trip to Bellingham: Day 2

The next day we got up early and planned to go on a "hike" on one of the local trails. We all meet up at Eric's house and headed over to the hiking area. For some reason I thought wearing shorts would be a good idea but not so much. I figured after we got going and moving I'd warm up enough and be glad I didn't decide to wear pants but that moment never happened. The trail was in a really pretty area. It ran alongside a creek that was lined with big green bushes and trees. Everything there is really green nothing like here, its very beautiful. At one point, the trail led underneath an old rustic bridge which was really cool. We had planned to walk to a park that was on the trail to meet up with Eric's in-laws and have a picnic in the park. They decided not to go on the hike and decided to be nice go to the store and get food for us for the picnic before we left for our hike. We were following the signs to the park and walked for probably a good hour or so. We finally came to a sign that said the park was .6 miles away so we knew were close. Then when we traveled the .6 miles we saw a sign that said the park was another mile or mile and a half away!! The sign lied to us!! We didn't wanna get to far away from the cars and we were getting pretty hungry and decided to head back to another park that was listed on the post that was back closer to where the cars were. Now I didn't mind the hike at all but I didn't realize how cold it was until we arrived at the park. I was starting to not feel so good by this time. I was hungry, had a headache and was cold and my nipples were hurting so much because it was so cold. We all thought that the Petersons (Eric's in-laws) would have been there already but they didn't end up arriving for another hour!! It tough but we made it. We were all getting a little irritable with the coldness, hunger and it didn't help that the kids thought that screaming at the top of their lungs was a fun thing to do especially inside the pavilion building which made their voices echo and sound that much louder. (We snatched the area to have the picnic inside to get out of the cold.) After realizing that we weren't gonna starve we went back to the hotel to change and go swimming at the pool. I however came back and unintentionally fell asleep. I had been in a funky mood since we finished our walk and when I woke up I felt funny and didn't really wanna do anything. I finally decided to go down to the pool and swim with everyone. It was fun and the pool was heated so that helped. After swimming we met up at the Peterson's hotel to have dinner in the conference room there. They ordered Olive Garden take out (which was lovely) and we had pasta and breadsticks. Rachel had organized a craft for the kids to decorate eggs since we wouldn't be seeing them during Easter. They weren't hard-boiled eggs but were more like color cardboard cut-outs and we painted and decorated some of those. I painted a Easter bunny on the one I made but it wasn't anything fancy. I always like to be artistic. Whenever we have crafting activities, pumpkin carving in particular, I always pick the hardest pattern to do and take the longest. Here's one I did a few years ago.

After dinner, we went back to our hotel and just chilled in our room and watched some TV before going to bed.

Trip to Bellingham: Day 1

This weekend Rachel and I went to Bellingham, WA. Rachel's brother just had a baby girl and we went up to meet her and go for her baby blessing. We left on Friday morning and had to get up at 4:30am which was something I was not looking forward, but I didn't fight it much when the time actually came. We left out of Long Beach and were on the same flight with her brother Mike and his family. We had planned our trip perfectly because after checking are bags, getting our board passes and going through all the security checkpoints they were in the middle of boarding our flight. We arrived in Seattle around 9:30 and Rachel's parents meet us at the airport. They had rented a van for all of us to share and we planned to spend the day in Seattle before going up to Bellingham which is about 2 hours north of Seattle. We had planned to meet up with Eric and his family (the brother we came to see) and spend the day at the zoo. It was a very cute zoo but the design of it was planned very poorly even the parking lots (plural) were strangely too small to accomodate a decent amout of cars. After we parked and met up with Eric at the entrance their was a slight panic as to where Brian, his oldest son was. We spent about 20 minutes trying to find him but Eric finally found found him. Somehow, he had ended up inside the park. After we had everyone we finally went inside.

Most of us were starving since we had been up since 4:30 and only had airplane food which for me was a sprite and bag of blue kettle chips. We looked at the penguins near the entrance and afterwards went to the food court area to eat. It was very packed at the zoo for a friday. The general consensus for the crowdedness was because it was the first sunny day in the area for a while. I had always heard that it was always dark and rainy in Seattle but I always thought it was just an exaggeration but apparently its the truth. Don't get me wrong its very beautiful but it was very cold and dreary during the majority of the trip.

I really liked that a lot of the animals at zoo were out and about. Usually when I go they're sleeping or in their little caves hiding from the crowds. The gorilla exhibit was especially cool. I didn't know gorillas climbed trees I always thought they stayed on the ground but these ones were up high in there tree/trapeze structure:

There was also this one that was just hanging out and eating right in front of everyone.

I didn't get any other pics of the animals except for this girafee which was cool. I've been having issues with my camera phone and a lot of the pics came out out of focus and blurry so I didn't get as many as I really wanted.

There was also a big carousel that the all kids went on which was cute to see them get all excited.

After the zoo we had some issues navigating to get to the freeway to get up to Bellingham. We eventually found our way thanks to modern technology aka our matching EVO smart phones. We rested for a little bit at our hotel and went out to dinner to Red Robin which everyone which was delicious after a long day.