Seattle Trip, Day One

A couple of weeks ago, my (immediate) family and I took a trip to Seattle to celebrate TWO graduations in my (extended) family - one from college at UW, and one from an incredibly impressive high school transition program. I am notoriously horrible at taking trips with lots of great photos, and then never posting the photos (do y'all know how time consuming it is to Flickr and then copy/paste source code for all these images? You don't? And you don't care? Okay okay) but THIS TIME I decided to change that trend. So this week, you will get a post a day about this short-but-sweet trip of ours, and hopefully I'll eventually get around to posting my leftover pics from travels in years gone by! Unfortunately for you, dear Bloggees, the first day was not very exciting for the majority of the day. Let me set the scene: your narrator awakens, at the unspeakably early hour of 5:35am, ready to put the finishing touches on her carry-on packing system and apply a little extra concealer to those dark circles. The family leaves the house at 6:45, fifteen minutes behind schedule but still on time for their flight. They park easily, get through security easily, and arrive at the gate with plenty of time to spare. They eat a subpar breakfast at a nearby "restaurant" (yes, liberal usage of the term restaurant is being applied here) and return to the gate with another thirty minutes to wait before boarding at 9:15am.

But, what's that you say? There's something wrong with the fuel-oil-pump-gauge-thingy? Our flight is delayed indefinitely and we won't get more information until 10:15?

(practically-still life: brother at airport)

So, we wait.I made some pretty substantial progress on both my "new summer line" (a.k.a. this bandana scarf I'm still designing) and my book club book for that month (My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, I highly recommend it!)...and wait......and wait......and wait.

Finally we get news - our flight is not only delayed indefinitely, but we can't get more information now until 1:15. Keep in mind, it only takes two hours to fly to Seattle. We were supposed to BE THERE by 1:15pm. Then it turns out, we can't get on the 4pm flight, and the 6:15 flight might not be an option either. So what does Momma MP say? "Screwwwww that!" Alright, she didn't really say that. It was either more or less scandalous than that, I won't tell you which.

Anyway, she hopped into action, organized a cockamamie plan for all of us to take a shuttle from SFO to SJC and get on a 3:15 flight through the same airline (which, by the way, was NOT Virgin America - I am never flying anything but Virgin or Jet Blue again. Ever. At least not after I take my pre-paid flight to Chicago in a couple of weeks by Delta. Ugh.), and we were finally out of the gate. Literally - we left the gate we'd been waiting at for hours.

We got to SJC in time, we got on the plane, and we landed in Seattle! Yay! We got our rental car and drove straight to our relatives' house, where the celebration was already in full swing about my cousin Jesse's graduation from college that day.

Toni and Abby, my aunt and cousin

We gorged (alright maybe just I did, I won't speak for anyone else on this front) on tamales, specially-crafted beer that Jesse picked out himself, and the most amazingly dense chocolate cake. We listened to family members share stories about Jesse and Abby over the years. We caught up with family we hadn't seen in person in over a year, and gave extra hugs to those ones we don't see often enough, which is all of them.

Aunt Nancy, my stepdad's older sister, and my beautiful momma

Oh yes, did I mention there were tamales?

Nick, Jesse and Abby's dad; Aunt Nancy's son; my stepdad's nephewThree generations!

(The best part about that picture is that I didn't even pose them like that... They all turned and smiled mid-sentence. What a photogenic family!)

Josh and Nick, brothers!Nick and Jesse, the father and son duoAnother three generations: Josh, Nancy, and Abby - Josh is Nancy's son and Abby's uncleThe sky over their house around 9pm

Eventually we peeled ourselves away from the soirée and headed over to check into our hotel. We had a whole second day of fun planned and we wanted to be rested and ready for action! And we were. Well, I don't know about the rested bit, but we had an action-filled second day...that you will all hear about this week! Get excited!

Sidenote: our hotel kind of sucked. I'm not that complainy about things like that in a service industry, since I used to work at a shoe store and I know how hard customer service can be, but really. It sucked. I'm not going to name drop (mainly because right now I can't even remember the name!) but if you're going to stay somewhere in downtown Seattle, do a lot of Yelp reading and googling. And if you really want deets, you can ask my friend Carly here in the comments! (Yep, just volunteered your opinion here Carly. Thanks for being such a good pal!)