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This past Tuesday was Eric’s 24th birthday.  I wanted him to think of something he’s always wanted to do but never had the chance, so he decided on the Seattle Underground Tour.  This tour is not something you’d want to bring young kids on, not because it’s terribly inappropriate, but because they’d probably be bored.  At the end of our tour, the parents of a couple kids in our group asked how they liked it.  They replied “Too much history!”  But for us, that made it extremely interesting.  It’s not really all that to look at, no skeletons or anything like that, just old musty ruins.  But the history and stories were fascinating.

Probably the coolest thing was learning about the engineering feat to build the ground a story higher than it originally was.  This is a picture of what used to be the first story of some Seattle shops, we were standing on the original sidewalks.

What’s interesting, is after the fire the destroyed Seattle, the city shop owners refused to wait (for years) until the streets were built a story higher.  They went ahead and rebuilt their shops.  So once the streets were built, shoppers had to climb ladders from the street to the sidewalk and back up again.  If you wanted to cross the street, you had to climb up a ladder, cross, and climb down another one!  This was bad for drunks heading home from the bar, and for pedestrians down below when freight fell off of trucks above.  After several deaths, the owners decided it was time for the sidewalks to move up as well.

Basically bridges were built between the road and the buildings, then the bridges were connected and paved over to make sidewalks.  It’s really quite impressive.  The second story of the buildings, became the ground floor, and the  first story became an unused basement.  The area under the sidewalks was never filled in, and created the tunnels.  There are some skylights in the tunnels, here’s an inside view of one.

It’s one of the few that’s also visible from above ground.  Most have been paved over because they weren’t safe.

All in all, we had a great time and really enjoyed it.  If you haven’t tried it, it’s worth the $14.  Just make sure to get there half an hour early (we were surprised by how full it was) and bring cash (no checks or credit cards accepted).  Enjoy checking out the old toilets and bathtubs!

Geocaching is a fun, outdoor, worldwide treasure hunt!  Eric and I had heard of it, and wanted to try it but didn’t get to until my friend (from Hawaii) Ginnie came to visit and took us on our first geocaching adventure.  She got us hooked!

The basics of geocaching are that you need a GPS receiver.  In this picture I’m holding Ginnie’s, a Garmin 60csx, which we liked so much we ended up buying the same one.  At geocaching.com, people post the GPS coordinates of where they have hidden a cache.  The post will also give descriptions, hints and other information.  The cache can be a variety of different containers.  I won’t tell you where these are, but here are pictures of some.  The one above is a large ammo can, it was full of all kinds of neat toys (if you take something, always leave something).

Ginnie is pointing to a well disguised micro (very small) cache that was hanging from a tree.  If you click on the picture you can see it better.  Micros are so small they only contain a paper log for you to sign with your handle.  Ours is wormeyman+dianasaur.

This micro is so tiny, it’s also called a nano.  It looks like a screw and is about the size of a pencil eraser.  Signing the log in this one is a lot easier if you can write tiny.

This micro is an itty bitty little duckie, with something similar to the above nano hidden inside him.

Another fun part of geocaching (and Eric’s favorite part) is something called Travel Bugs.  They are trackable items that move from place to place.  Every time someone moves it, they post where they took it so you can watch it travel around the world.  Often they have goals, this one is Gator Bait.  He’s from Florida and his goal is to play in the snow and get pictures so his owners (2 children) can see him in it.  He traveled all the way to Washington without anyone taking pictures of him in the snow, so even though it was spring time here, we took a day trip to the Pass so we could get him to some snow.

We took lots of pictures of him in very snow poses, but this is my favorite!

Ironically, the day after we’d gone to the Pass, we got a freak snow day at home!  What happened to Spring?  So here he is on top of our car at our apartment.

If you’re in the Washington area, and want to try geocaching, let us know.  We’ve taken our family members more than once.  It’s a great way to get outdoors together, and we love it!

So today Diana and i went to pikes place fish market with Heather and her friend Dan to participate in a pillow fight organized by the seattle pillowfight society Diana found out via improv everywhere’s seattle branch (yet to be named). We arrived there early with Diana being VERY “pregnant” with her pillow hidden under a maternity shirt. And I being thoroughly embarrassed feeling that we’d have to lie or dodge questions about how pregnant she was. Fortunately nothing that embarrassing happened and it turned out that i didn’t have anything to worry about. While i didn’t participate in the pillow fight i managed to snag a good shooting location by standing on top of a garbage can video should be uploaded soon but don’t count on it!