A Trip From Sea To Shining Sea

Recently Rick and I made a short trip back home to the Pacific Northwest for a visit with the family and a little walk down memory lane.  We landed in Portland, OR in the wee hours of the morning and after about 5 hours of sleep we drove up to Seattle for a day of sightseeing.

Of course a trip to Seattle would not be complete without visiting Pike Street Market!  The newest addition to the area is the wall of gum!

My sister and niece were with us and of course we had to contribute to the colorful wall.

My contribution is the pink bubble gum heart.

While there we had to stop into Ye Olde Curiosity Shop which is an emporium of oddities including this dog (Petri-Fido) that really made me laugh!

As you can see it was a very foggy but beautiful day.  The Space Needle:

They have a 200 ft high ferris wheel down by the waterfront so you can get some really great views of the city on a clear day but not that day!  It was a great first day of our trip.

The next morning we visited our old workplace: Fort Vancouver NHS in Vancouver, WA.  The Fort is an old Hudson's Bay Company fur trading post that was run by the British in the mid-19th century.

My favorite part of the Fort was the large period garden that Rick and I managed when he was a Park Ranger and I was a Maintenance employee there.

In my first year of working at the Fort I was a Park Ranger / Fee Collector and had a lot of time on my hands so I did some research on one of the families that lived in the Fort in 1845.  They had a young daughter named Cecelia Douglas and I thought it would be fun to create a sampler, pretending to be her, that would feature her family history and show her needle-working skills.  I was hoping the sampler was still being used as an interpretive tool and it was!  Later I realized that the day we visited the Fort, Oct 24th, was Cecelia's birthday.  How cosmic is that?

The next day we spent driving up the Columbia River Gorge which is absolutely beautiful, especially the Oregon side which is dotted with waterfalls and great hiking trails.

This one is called Horsetail Falls.  Can you see why? :)

The big Antiques and Collectibles Sale at the Portland Expo Center was happening while we were there and it was fun to see some of the old dealers we used to buy from when we lived there.  We were  especially happy to see Robert Merck, a fantastic antique Christmas ornament collector who wrote a book a few years back called Deck the Halls.  I was so thrilled to get a little Halloween candy container from his booth.

We didn't have much room in our suitcases but we found a few cute vintage Halloween and Christmas decorations for really great prices.

It was a super fun trip and it was great seeing our family and shopping for vintage goodies too!