Seattle - Day 2

Second day in the city, it rained. Lucky for us, we have reserved the camp site for another night so we don't have to pack up our tent in the rain. Also, the tarp over the tent was set up very well, thanks to Pramod, and we didn't get rained on in our sleep!!

Rainy day, we went to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. It was great! We got to see some glass work in action while a team worked on a flower--Putting glass together, another team worked on a tiger--making textured glass & shaping it, and the last team was blowing glass bowls. Very cool. I liked it more than the museum itself. There were some pieces out that were designed by kids and made into glass by professionals. Those were really fun. The gift shop also had some amazing stuff that was just too expensive and breakable to bring home with us.

We then drove to China Town/the International District to walk & eat. It was like a different world there, and the parking was a little cheaper.

Since it was still somewhat rainy, we decided to go see a movie. Not very Seattle specific, but there's only so much touring one can do before they need to relax (and I don't mean the 1/5 days in Seattle--I mean the 2 months that we've been traveling). There was a theater by our camp site that had $2 movies! Only $4 for the two of us. What could be better than that? How about $1 Tuesdays? So we decided to see two movies: Day and Knight and The Last Airbender. We liked them both for very different reasons.

Seattle

We arrived in Seattle around noon. Because we dropped mom off at the airport at 5 am, a 7 hour drive got us there pretty early. We had some errands to run: getting the car oil changed, finding a FedEx to return Pramod's broken phone, and checking into our campsite. None of this was actually done in Seattle. We camped about 30 minutes south of the city in Federal Way.

After those errands, we went for our first tour of Seattle. I don't even like to drive in Boston, so I knew it was a mistake to be driving into Seattle. Those streets heading down to the water are scary! I'm glad they checked out our breaks when we had the oil changed -- not that anything was wrong with them, just for peace of mind.

The parking situation is expensive. The very illusive street parking is $2.50 per hour. Other advertised parking was $8 for 2 hours. After driving around for a while, we settled for $9 for 3 hours. Now I guess that's not too bad, but I don't know what we'll do when we come in for a full day tomorrow... ugh money stresses me out!

While downtown, we checked out Pike's Place Market. It reminded us a lot of the market in Mysore: lots of people, noise, things to see, and strong smells (fish, food, and flowers especially).

Missoula, Montana

I haven't blogged the entire time we've been in Missoula. I've been much too busy relaxing and spending time with family. What can I say? I'm a home body. I love spending time with people I know and doing a few spectacular things mixed in with mostly the every day.

One of my favorite things to do was Grandma's physical therapy exercise with her. Bill made this great tape with her exercises put to classical music. While these were exercises designed for an older woman, we put in additional movements to make it more difficult for us (Mom, Pramod, Bill, Marty, and myself). We did things like doing a sit-up with every leg raise. It was really fun!

After the exercises, we usually all did a short, easy yoga class after.

Grandma would rest during the sun salutations then join us for the seated poses. It's amazing how well she gets around on the floor!

We also had a great tubing trip, volley ball game, tennis practice, and some very nice meals.

It was really nice to be comfortable for the last week! Thanks to all you Andersons (and Heard)!

Yellowstone National Park - Wyoming

Yellowstone National Park is amazing!!

Black Hills - SD

Mount Rushemore

Crazy Horse

Badlands - South Dakota

The Badlands: not much to say except to put of pictures. It was well worth the 10 hour trip!

Oh and we loved the camping! We spent Thursday making the drive from northern Minnesota. We arrived around 6 that evening. We spent a while driving to our campsite -- you have to drive halfway around the "loop" to get to the free campsite. We set up camp, ate and played UNO until it was too dark to see our cards (which was pretty dark because the numbers are big and the colors just became different shades of gray). There was a beautiful sunset!

The next morning (there was a bison standing right in the campsite): breakfast, packing up, then we did a short hike (not even a mile), but it was 95 degrees today and very dry so that was enough.

Weeding

Pramod and I decided that in our free time we would weed. We made a plan to weed every row once before leaving the farm. With 40 something rows, we needed to weed 1 row a day (plus we plowed some of the rows with Paul in order to plant in them).

We started slacking by the end of the time here and some rows were more work than others (ex. tomatoes dominate the rows and its harder to get down under the plants). We didn't get them all done, sadly. Another problem that we found was that those rows that we weeded at the beginning of our time needed to be weeded again at the end. We did actually weed a couple of rows twice. They just keep coming back.

We put paper bags around the base of the squash plants to discourage weed growth. The nice thing about this is that during the winter the paper will decompose and just be good for the soil. Some plants have large enough leaves that they need weeding when they're small but they'll shade out most of the weeds later.

Paul told us that after plowing and planting seeds, weed growth isn't bad because it helps protect the seedlings as they begin to grow. As they get big enough to need all the sunlight they can get, however, weeding is very important.

Weeding is definitely a problem that can be hard to stay on top of with a garden as big as Paul's garden.