Pike Place Market

About a week and a half ago Verna took Dad and us to Pike Place Market in Seattle.  It has all kinds of shops from vegetable stands, bookstores (all extremely liberal), clothing stores to the famous fish place where they throw the fish to each other.  The fish stench was just gross.  And the people, so many people!  Cody and I had to take a breath and relax, because, there were just too many and they made us a little nervous.  I was constantly counting heads to make sure we all stayed together.  I knew we would be okay with the girls.  They would make sure they stayed near us, but Noah has a tendency to not pay attention to his surroundings.  I was worried that he would walk off thinking we were behind him when we really weren’t.  He did really well though.  He stayed near one of the adults most of the time and the one time I had to call out for him he had just turned a corner and was waiting on the rest of us.

There is a doughnut stand there where they make the doughnuts right then and there.  Miniature round chocolate covered doughnuts with sprinkles, powdered doughnuts or plain doughnuts, and they were good.  Verna bought three dozen of them.  I tried one of each and was happy to leave the rest to the kids.  Noah and Chad stopped to feed the pigeons some of the doughnut leftovers.  They got one of the pigeons to come and eat right from Noah's hand.  You can tell they were feed leftovers a lot.  They had no fear of humans.

There was a stand that sold different kinds of pasta and Ryan got to try chocolate pasta.  Yes, you read that right, chocolate pasta.  It wasn’t even cooked yet.  What do you put on chocolate pasta?  I am usually up for anything chocolate, but not that.  She said it was bitter to start with but was actually pretty good.  I will have to take her word for it.

So the market has a gum wall.  It is a side of a building where people have put their gum over the years.  It was so thick you couldn’t see the brick underneath, just the gum.  People would go and write out stuff with their gum or draw faces with it.  On the windowsill they would place their gum and pull it down so that it would look stringy and covered the windowsill that way.  Everyone but me put their gum up on that wall, even Jessica.  I would never have thought she would do it, but she did, without wipes or hand sanitizer.

We finally left and went to look at the Space Needle.  There is a convention center near it that was having a Battlestar Galactica convention.  Chad wanted to get tickets to go.  Thankfully and much to Noah’s dismay, I talked Chad out of it.

Dad left this past Wednesday.  It was nice to have him here and it was hard to watch him leave.  He was a piece of home right here in Washington.  That may sound strange, but I don’t know how to explain it any other way.  He spoiled us all and reminded us of what we were missing back in Oklahoma.  I love you dad.