Mom and Dad visit Seattle

My parents came to Seattle to visit for a week starting on August 4th. Every year I try my best to coax them to come down during the summer when the Pacific Northwest is one of the best places on earth to be (in my opinion of course). Luckily enough, we had a pretty good excuse to get them down this summer :)

This time around we decided to tour some of the local sites rather than do larger trips as we had in the past. Instead of going to Rainier, or Vancouver Island, we stayed local to see some of the sites nearby.

Here is a link to more photos. 

Snoqualmie Falls

Our first stop was Snoqualmie Falls. For some reason I had never shown them this very accessible view, just over a half hour drive from Seattle, this is a great place to go.

Here are mom and dad at the top of the falls:

There is a hiking trail down to the bottom of the falls, and we decided that we had the energy to make the trek down.

This is mom climbing a tree on the way down to the base:

 

View from the bottom:

Rattlesnake Ledge

At this point we decided we still had enough energy to try out another local Seattle hike – Rattlesnake Ledge. Rattlesnake is a great hike because it’s relatively short, and it has an amazing view at the top.

Here we are up at the top of the climb:

Dad and I at the end of our hike:

 

After our hike, we went over to the Columbia Crest Winery to cap the day off properly.

Crabbing

Now for something that I’ve never done before… Crabbing. Our good friends Henry and Trang went crabbing last year, and they bought crab traps, and bait. They expressed interest in helping show us the ropes of crabbing, so after buying a crabbing pass we were able to take the ferry over to Bremerton to find out what this crabbing thing was all about.

Waking up before 6am on a Saturday seems a bit nuts, but apparently you need to catch the early ferry in order to get a good spot on the dock.

Here we are waiting for the ferry after grabbing some well needed caffeine:

When we got to the dock, Henry and Trang were already there:

There are two types of crabs to catch here – Red Rock, and Dungeness. Each of which has their own size limits. You cannot catch any females, so part of our crabbing education was how to measure, and determine the sex of a crab – very interesting.

Ok, so we caught some crabs… Now what:

 

Here I’m throwing a trap in for another slew of crab:

The whole crabbing crew:

It’s amazing how many crabs we’d pull up every minute or two. 99% of these did not fit the size restrictions, so had to be thrown back. At the end of the day we had caught 6 total that were larger than 6” across.

So, we invited a few folks over for dinner and then Henry taught us how to clean and cook crab. Which was another experience all in itself.

Cleaning crab:

Eating crab:

I’d definitely say that overall crabbing was a lot more exciting, and interesting than I thought it would be. It was actually pretty fun!

Little Si

My parents somehow still had hiking energy left at the end of our week. We decided to go to another well known local hike – Little Si. Little Si has about half the elevation gain of it’s bigger brother next door, but the hike itself is very pleasant, and you can see a pretty good panoramic from the top including Mt. Si’s Haystack.

And…

In addition to all this hiking, dad helped me do a lot of very useful things around the house. We rewired some of our light switches, added a lock to our bathroom door, installed a cat door to the basement, and fixed the garage door… I’m sure he did a lot more too, but that’s the stuff I can remember off the top of my head.

Anyhow, mom/dad, thank you so much for coming out, and I do hope you’re able to come sometime soon in the new year!