Our Last Day in Washington

April 24th

Our last day in Washington was jam packed. Like all good mornings, it started with donuts. We found a place just north of Seattle called Mighty-O donuts. It was in a really cute neighborhood and would have been a really fun place to just hang out for a while, but we had a lot to see today so we grabbed the recommended French Toast donut, lemon poppyseed donut and the chocolate peanut butter donut. There best seller was the lemon poppyseed and it was spot on! I also gave Seattle another chance at the chai but I was disappointed again. Apparently coffee is there thing, on the only thing they can do for your morning caffeine fix. That was ok. The donuts more then made up for the sub par chai. It was better then yesterdays...

After donuts, we were on a mission. There is this town called Fremont just outside of downtown Seattle and from what I could tell, it is right up our alley. Our first adventure was to find the Fremont Troll. This thing is AMAZING! It is something everyone should see in person. He is just so cool. He hangs out under the bridge and apparently grabs cars.

That is a real VW bug under his hand! Check it out!!

After the troll, we headed to Fremont's downtown area. This is definitely a place I would like to come back and explore more another time. It just seems so chill. But in what I think is the center of there downtown is the Center of the Universe! How amazing is that? We have now been to TWO centers of the universe! This one and one in Delphi, Greece.

Fremont, Washington

Delphi, Greece

We found two last amazing things before leaving Fremont. The first was a very large statue of Vladimir Illych Lenin. No, not the Lenin you would think, the Communism, and the former Soviet Union, yeah, weird.

The other amazing thing we found we Sweet & Savory Pie. It was so good. We tried a Key Lime Pie and a strawberry rhubarb pie. So good and a really fun find.

After our quick stop in Fremont we had a very important stop back in Seattle. I was super excited about this place and it was worth backtracking a little just to go to The Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co. This place just sounded amazing and I had to try there cupcakes.

Jed just dropped me off at the door for me to run in and get ONE cupcake and then hit the road. I knew I was up to the challenge of picking ONE cupcake and heading out but when I got in there it was a completely different ballgame. Oh man! I knew the ONE cupcake that I had to have as soon as I saw it. Pancakes N Bacon. I mean, really, is there any question. It is a cupcake with bacon. Clearly a no brainer. But then all the other cupcakes were calling my name and I couldn't resist. So the caramel delight had to come with me too. Even though I was only going to walk away with ONE cupcake, I was pretty proud that I only walked out of there with two. It could have gotten a lot worse!

Oh and they were AMAZING! I could eat these everyday.

So after a quick cupcake stop, we were back on the road with a ton of options to check out. We were going to go to the Skagit Tulip Festival or Snoqualmie Falls but we wanted to hit the Canada border first. We figured we would head over the border, get our passports stamped, grab some lunch just over the border and head off to other places in Washington. But somewhere along the drive we learned about Capilano's Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver. And then we found this Diners, Drive In and Dives place, Tomahawk Restaurant. So then we just had to go.

Our first stop was Tomahawk Restaurant. This place was unique. They have "Yukon bacon". I have no idea what that really means but it looked like huge pieces of ham as opposed to what I know as bacon. I didn't love it but I think it is a place everyone should try.

Just down the road from the restaurant was Capilano's Suspension Bridge. It was kind Swiss Family Robinson for adults. It was a lot of fun but really expensive. We didn't have long before we had to start heading back to Seattle to catch our flight in the evening so we paid the crazy entrance fee to hang out for about 2 hours but we had a great time.

We left North Vancouver around 3:30 in the afternoon, plenty of time to get back to Seattle and even time to explore the waterfall or the tulips if we played our cards right. Then we hit our first hiccup. Traffic. Oh boy was there traffic. It was crazy traffic and we were not moving. We stared at the GPS and watched our estimated arrival time to the Seattle Airport get closer and closer to the when our flight was supposed to leave. It took hours to get through the traffic but after superb driving by Jed we were finally clear of the traffic and only one last small obstacle til we were back in the states and home free. We were both pretty excited to finally see this sign.

Just a quick stop at the border to show our passports and answer a few simple questions and we should be on our way to dinner and a red eye flight home. That is until we got to the border stop... When we got to the border stop they asked to typical questions, "Why were you in Canada?", "What did you do?", "Where are you from?", they put a neon sticker on our windshield and told us to go a different way then every other car. It brought us to a parking lot with what looked to be a closed building in front of us. There were only about 3 other cars in the parking lot and we were really confused. We had no idea what we had done and what were were supposed to do. We drove around the parking lot and found a guy in a uniform at a little hut thingy. We figured he could help. Through a lot of confusion, we learned that we had to go into the closed building and talk to people in there. They required us to fill out paper work to declare the $2 worth of post cards we purchased and then took our keys and searched our car. But no sweat, it only cost us about another 45 minutes to an hour to our trip. When we finally got through it all we HAD to stop and get this picture.

I think Jed summed it up best when he said, "We can't be the only people to drive up to Vancouver for lunch on a Tuesday.... Well, maybe we are." Definitely an event that I will not soon forget.

As we set off to hustle to the airport we saw this and HAD to make a quick stop to get this picture.

50th State!

Jed did a great job of getting us back to Seattle in record time. We even had 20 extra minutes to make a very quick stop at a Jamba Juice (the best) and the local favorite, Dicks Drive In. It was no In-N-Out, but we were glad we got to try it.

Seattle was a super fun place and I look forward to making another trip out west to explore more of it.