Another day and another battle to get the kids out of bed and even with us heading to the snow at Stevens Pass. We eventually got on the road and heading through some breathtaking scenery as well as a few of those little US country towns you see in the movies.

By the time we got our skis and lift tickets it was midday. We were lucky enough to get some ski hire coupons from one of Chip and Joans sons, Bill and the ski hire cashier gave us one more as well as it was her last day on the mountain.

This meant that we got top of the line skis and boots for $22 each for the day.

Being a Sunday meant that we had to share the mountain with a lot of others but this wasn’t an issue as the runs and snow was plentiful so the lines moved quick at the lifts.

Today was one of the last days of the ski season for Stevens Pass (Australian ski fields would kill for these conditions mid season) so some novelty events were held. This kept the runs less crowded as well.

The events were the dummy run and the pond skimming. Both involved skiing over a 30 metre pond at the bottom of a run near the ski lodges.

The first runs were dummies set up on skis. It was then extended to anyone and around 200 took the challenge. Some were successful and others got horribly wet.

At the end of the day, we headed down off the mountain to a little village called Skykomish. Chip and Joan had a cabin (although it was more like a house :)) in town and spent each Sunday up here. Chip is also the Captain for the Skykomish Valley Fire & Rescue.

Chip took Bradley and I on a tour of the Fire Station then we went over to look at one of their unsuccessful saves. Only last week, there was an arson attack on the Whistling Post (the local pub) following a raid on the ATM in the wall. Even though the building was lost, they did prevent the fire spreading to adjoining buildings, remembering that all their buildings are old and made of wood.

A walk next door to the Cascadia Cafe for dinner and once again, the kids had eyes bigger than their stomachs.
Bill, Lorri and Sean made it down off the mountain to meet us then it was time to head back to Seattle.

One last “highlight” for the day was being pulled over by the King County Sherriff. I had the setting wrong on the lights (not on automatic) so as it go dark I had lights at the front but no taillights. He was good about it so no spending a night in the cells with Bubba.

It turns out that Chip knows this sherrif so is going to give him a hard time for pulling over the “Aussies”.

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The plan today was to head east of Seattle and go skiing, however, the locals have had such a good season that they are over skiing so the resorts have all shut down for the start of the week. So no skiing today for us. 🙁 We will get out there tomorrow though. 🙂

So what to do. Why not visit Microsoft – it is only just up the road. And what a huge complex it is – it is almost a city in itself. We spent a couple of hours in the Visitor Centre even though the kids didn’t want to go there. I had to drag them out.

Next it was into Seattle to the Space Needle. Even though visibility wasn’t too good, it was still a good view from up there. Rachael wasn’t too happy going up in the external lifts to the observation area but it wasn’t too bad as we didn’t need seat belts like Disneylands Tower of Terror. Met up with a couple of college freshmen that gave us a good explanation of what was around – we are not going to have enough time to see it all.

After getting back on ground level, a quick visit to the International Fountain, REI with its internal climbing wall, mountain bike test track and park then onto Lake Union to look at the floating houses. These are actual houses that float on Lake Union. Some have been there for a long time and there are now a lot of new expensive ones as well.

Back to the Universtity Motel Suites for tea and prepare for skiing tomorrow at Snoqualmie.

Interesting fact: I have been wondering why we seem to have a lot of fire trucks with sirens around. It appears we are just 100 metres from Seattle Fire Department Station 17 and I didn’t even realise it.

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Today was a little bit different to your normal tourist type day in Los Angeles. We headed north towards Simi Valley and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Rachael wanted to do Beverly Hills along the way so we did a “mainy” along Rodeo Drive before stopping for photos at the Beverly Hills sign.

The kids wanted to see some of the stars homes so did some driving around the roads looking at fences and security cameras – that is about all you can see of them. 🙁

It was then onto Simi Valley but not before stopping at In-n-Out Burger for lunch. It wasn’t long before we were heading up Presidential Drive to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. What a great spot for this library with some great views to the north and west.

Prior to this visit, we only had a general knowledge of Ronald Reagan and this was certainly an interesting place to visit and find out a lot more. He certainly was a remarkable man. No wonder a lot of Americans would like him back. The kids got a lot out of it especially Rachael who read just about every panel during the walk through.

A highlight of the visit was to get to go aboard Air Force One. Of course this is not the current one but the Air Force One that flew from 1973 to 2001. This one is a Boeing 707 which had the callsign SAM 27000. It is not as big as the current Boeing 747’s but they still jammed as much into it as they could.

We stuck around until closing time, checking out the section of the Berlin Wall and Ronald Reagan’s grave.

It had been a long day and the plan was to head over to Malibu for dinner at Paradise Cove but not tonight – it will have to wait for another time. Time to make the long slog back to Anaheim.

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