Thanksgiving in Spokane
Our Thanksgiving was awesome! We couldn’t have hoped for a better weekend. Wonderful hospitality!!! Excellent Company!!! Great Food!!! Lots of Shopping!!! A HUGE Thank You to Aunt Mary and James!!!
We left for Spokane at 8:30 on Wednesday morning and made good time. It came out to be exactly a nine hour drive (540 miles). Emma behaved the entire way except for a few spills in her seat. That night we ate Panda Express (we picked it up) and pizza (Aunt Mary picked up) and visited with folks. Emma discovered the other members of the family… Eddie and Lucy the dogs... She was in heaven!!!
In the early afternoon on Thanksgiving Day the grandparents arrived from Yakima. It was so great to see them! We visited with each other for most of the day. Thanksgiving dinner took place at 1pm and we remained full for the rest of the day. James, Jonas, Emma, myself, and Lucy the dog took a walk an hour or so after dinner. It started snowing on our way back. Later that night we looked through the millions of Black Friday ads. We even did some early sale shopping at Shopko that night and we ended the evening with a movie and lots of pie and sparkling cider.
BLACK FRIDAY! We awoke at 6am to find a couple inches of snow on the ground. Emma absolutely loved it!!! James, Sarah, Emma, Jonas and I hit the stores at 7am. We went to Target, Circuit City, Old Navy, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Linen’s & Things, which was going out of business. Then we ate breakfast at IHOP. After a yummy breakfast we hit the Spokane Valley Mall, Barnes & Noble, Cabala’s and Hasting’s. Overall it was a great day! We got a lot of our Christmas shopping done and we even found some cool stuff for ourselves. Emma did amazingly well for having woken up so early and shopping all day. Our evening ended with us buying the fixings for James’ homemade hot chocolate. It was sooooo good!!! We’re talking melted dark chocolate and cream – not that dried powder stuff! For dinner we had leftover Thanksgiving. Mmmm! We chatted for a while and then tried to get through a movie, but we all fell asleep. It was for the best though as we had another day of shopping ahead of us.
Saturday we got up and said goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa. We were sad to see them go, but our visit with them was really great! Later that morning we organized ourselves for our final shopping day. We took off at around 9am. We went to REI where Jonas [finally] found and bought an awesome pair of rain pants and a really nice rain jacket. Then we went to our favorite place in the world, “World Market.” We found some awesome things! Then we went to Costco to get some essentials. The Northtown Mall was next. We spent a ton of time in there. Then we went to Riverpark Square which is my favorite place to shop. The shopping experience went downhill right after we paid for parking and we were getting Emma’s stroller out. One of the back wheels just broke off! It was unfixable, so we trashed it and attempted to shop without having a contained 2-year-old. Emma didn’t behave at all and we left within the hour. Emma fell asleep on the way to our next stop. James and I went to check out the Kitchen Engine without Jonas and Emma. It was a cool store with every kitchen tool imaginable. We got back to the car to find Jonas and Emma asleep. Our last item to buy was a new stroller so we had to make a few stops to find the right one. Wal-Mart, Toys R’ US, and Target were the last three stops. Target had the best strollers and we found a good one for $14. We also found a couple kitchen tools their as well. Overall our 2-day shopping extravaganza was a great success!!! I can’t tell you all about the awesome gifts we found, but I can tell you that the awesomest thing we found was a wall size print of our favorite art piece; Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print, “The Great Wave.” It is so awesome! Right now it is all rolled up waiting to get mounted and framed. A HUGE thanks to James!!! He was awesome with Emma; helping keep track of her and keeping her happy.
That night we took James and Mary to dinner at an awesome restaurant called Wolf Lodge. They have the best food I have probably ever eaten. Our beverages consisted of, Huckleberry lemonade and Alaskan Amber on tap. First course: Crab & Artichoke dip with French bread and Spicy Calamari. The calamari was the best I’ve ever had and Emma ate most of it! Second course was Spinach & Pear salads with sourdough bread. Last course: Mary had a ribeye, James had filet mignon and Jonas had a New York strip steak while I had the halibut Olympia. Words can not describe how good the food was!!! Jonas said that it was so good that the steak didn’t even need the 57 Sauce that he normally douses his steaks with. Emma was awesome in the restaurant and we were so thrilled because it wasn’t the best “kid’s restaurant.”
Sunday morning at 8:30 we said our good-byes and took off for Sutherlin. It was sad leaving, but we had to leave and get Jonas back to work to pay for all our expenditures. One nice thing about the drive home is that it got steadily warmer all the way back! From near freezing in Spokane to 60 along I-5 between Portland and Sutherlin. This was seriously the best long weekend we have had in a long time! It was so good to visit with family!!! Thank you for such a wonderful time!!!
A few hours down the road we decided to stop off at the Woodburn Outlet shops. There were some amazing sales going on and we got some great deals. We pulled into our garage around 8:30pm. Our drive was good except for some stand-still traffic south of Salem, but it was brief. Emma did wonderfully on the long drive home.
