Larabee State Park

Here's more from Grandma and Grandpa McLean visiting us.

We went to Larabee State Park, which is mainly a beach park, but there's a mountain, too. It's near Bellingham, Washginton.

First, we spent a few hours on the beach.















Then, we walked back up to the main part of the park. On the way, we climbed under a train trestle. We heard the distant rumbling of a train, so we waited...



And we were rewarded with not one, but two train sightings!



Then we headed up to the top of a logging road (we didn't realize it would be gravel almost the entire way) to get to a nice viewpoint!





While we were there, we heard some eagles making a huge fuss. I suspect they don't get a ton of visitors up there, as most people don't make the trek up the terrifying logging road. Sadly, we didn't get any photos of them, but we heard them! They don't sound like you'd expect...very silly birds.

Then, Grandpa George and I left Grandma Julie and Anthony down at the viewpoint (they were hot and tired), and we tried to go another hundred or so feet up to the top of the mountain. It was forested and very pretty...but no better views. Oh well! It was still fun.





We finished off the evening with a fantastic seafood dinner at a place in Bellingham. It was right on the water and had great views.

Grandpa George and Grandma Julie visit

My parents (the McLeans) were here back in July. We had perfect Seattle weather and had a bunch of fun.

The first thing we did was go down to Seattle for a day. We went to the Ballard Locks to see the salmon come up through the fish ladder on their way to spawn. Then we went to the new Seattle ferris wheel, the Great Wheel, which opened less than a month before their arrival.

First, the fish!

















Then it was off to the wheel. The views were spectacular!

Pumpkin update

We saw a really cool pumpkin catapult at Jubilee farm. Check it out. :)

Pumpkin Chunkin! from Missy Leone on Vimeo.

Pumpkins and trains

I'm not quite caught up on the backlog of photos but I thought I would share an update from this weekend. These are photos from the point and shoot camera...I'll upload some film shots later, when they're developed.

This is Larry's last weekend before he takes the professional engineer exam. Anthony and I wanted to give him as much peace and quiet as we could, so we went and did a photo stroll with my Seattle Flickr photo group. We went to a pumpkin farm, which was a lot of fun, but the best part was on the way home. We stopped by a real working diesel-electric train that lives in Woodinville. It lives behind a protective fence when it's not working, but the fellow who works on it most of the time was tinkering around on it this weekend, and he let us in to see it!





























And then we saw the train. It was really neat. Basically, the state highway (SR-202) goes up from the pumpkin farm, which is in Carnation, past Redmond, and ends up passing part of a bunch of railroad lines in Woodinville. BNSF owns most of the railroad in that area, as far as I can tell, and they've decommissioned the entirety of it in Redmond. But in Woodinville, which is right next door, the trains still work, every day.

This one train, part of the Eastside Freight Railroad, stays behind a chain link fence with concertina wire, which is the stuff they use at prisons, to keep people out. Well, I didn't realize it was a working train...just figured it was a train museum or something. Lucky for us, we stopped by and checked it out, and this incredibly nice gentleman, Clyde, showed us around and let us in the engine room and on the caboose. I think it was the best day in Anthony's life, so far. Clyde even gave us a model railroad magazine and a bunch of pictures he'd taken of the train (and one of him in full conductor garb).

It was fun! Clyde gave us contact information. He said that, occasionally, they do private rides. We can call the railroad periodically to see when the next one is, and we might be able to go for a ride!











Here are Clyde's photos that he gave us.