Thanksgiving

Started: 2023-12-21 20:57:57

Submitted: 2023-12-24 00:05:46

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Thanksgiving in Washington with the Stone family, plus a trip to Seattle to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra

For Thanksgiving this year we went to visit the Stone family in Washington state.

The easiest way to get to the particular corner of Washington state where my in-laws live is to drive to Oakland, then catch a direct Southwest flight to Bellingham. My brother-in-law lives on the outskirts of Bellingham, and my in-laws live outside of Mount Vernon, a half-hour's drive south along I-5.

The kids were in school on Monday and Tuesday the week of Thanksgiving, so we didn't leave until Wednesday morning. (I saw a news article suggesting that many schools had the whole week off, so the Thanksgiving travel season would spill earlier into the week, but our school district is more interested in squeezing an entire semester before Christmas that we started school this year in early August. They needed those extra two days of school so the fall semester didn't stretch a day past Christmas.)

The most interesting that that happened at the airport was that one of the passengers at the security checkpoint learned the hard way that she couldn't take a snow globe through security in her carry-on bag, presumably because it contains water (and the TSA is still scared about mythical binary liquid explosives).

The most interesting that happened on our flight to Bellingham was that our aircraft turned out to be a 737 MAX8. I checked the safety information card and it didn't say anything about MCAS. This was my second time on a 737 MAX, and the first time with my entire family on the same plane. When we reached Bellingham after our two-hour flight I took the opportunity to take a selfie with this cursed aircraft type. (I remain bemused that an airport in an infamously-rainy region would decline to build jet bridges and instead rely on passengers disembarking via an outdoor ramp onto the tarmac; but it was dry (though cool and cloudy, with the humid air smelling faintly of incessant rain) when we arrived.)

We met my in-laws for lunch at The Olive Garden somewhere in town, then stopped for groceries for our Airbnb. It was Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving, and Fred Meyer was packed with people scrambling to complete their last-minute shopping before the holiday.

We got an Airbnb somewhere in rural Skagit County, on a farm between Burlington and Padilla Bay. Its mailing address was Bow, but it was closer to the towns of Allen and Bay View, not far from the golf course where my in-laws live. The Airbnb looked like the attic above a barn had been finished into a one-bedroom ADU. This was a place where it helped to find it first when it was still daylight, so we could follow the directions down the driveway and turn past the farmhouse and its tidy hedge to find the building we stayed in, next to a much larger green-roofed barn that stood out as a landmark a mile away on the section road.

Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving morning, by daylight, we got a better view of the blueberry fields that surrounded our Airbnb. This far north, in November, the sun rose late and set early, and stayed low in the sky. There was a bit of frost on the ground, which eventually melted as the morning progressed. The sky was uncharacteristically clear, and the sun reflected off the frost and the dew on the grass, leaving the blueberry bushes (planted in neat long rows like a vineyard) in shadows.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws, then in the afternoon took a long walk on a trail system running past the Skagit Regional Airport. In the evening we returned to our Airbnb and played the game "Sheriff of Nottingham", which was an amusing social bluffing game (though I'm not sure about the merits of encouraging our children to lie to us in the context of a game, though they did not seem to be very good at it).

Friday, 24th November

When we got up on Friday morning the kids were sniffling so we stopped by a drug store in Burlington to pick up COVID-19 tests. Both kids tested negative, so we proceeded on to my brother-in-law Tristan's house on the outskirts of Burlington, where we celebrated an early Stone family Christmas. After lunch Tristan and I went to Galbraith Mountain to mountain bike. It's been (mumble) years since I did anything resembling mountain biking (I don't even currently own a mountain bike; my bike is a road bike with slick tires, though I've thought more than once that I ought to consider mountain biking since I live in Santa Cruz surrounded by mountain biking trails). The afternoon was crisp and bright (it didn't rain the entire time we were in Washington, due to an unseasonable high pressure system), and the trails were only a little muddy. We rode up a series of dirt roads, past houses in the forest (clearly occupying the wildland-urban interface) into a part of the forest covered in single-track trails leading between the dirt roads. We took several of the trails, winding deeper into the forest, climbing and descending, and encountered multiple families with young children trying to navigate the muddy trails while their parents waited patiently. After one lap I decided I was satisfied with the ride (and Tristan's dog Suki had run off at least some of her energy) so we headed back to the car.

Saturday, 25th November

On Saturday morning we dropped by the visitor's center at the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, located a few miles west of our Airbnb on the east shore of Padilla Bay. The visitor's center had a few rooms with displays explaining the ecosystem of the bay, including the interesting detail that most of the bay is mud flats at low tide, which makes it a prime location for birds to feed on the invertebrates that make their home in the mud. One room had a small aquarium with a couple of displays, including a large tank with several active starfish. The sunflower stars had at least a dozen arms and had attached themselves to the glass on the tank, letting us see the tiny tentacles on the bottom of their arms. One of the sunflower stars was extremely active; it took only a minute or two for it to move all the way across the tank to the point where it started brushing its arms against the arms of the other sunflower star.

Opposite the large tank was a petting zoo with some of the common animals living in tide pools, including starfish and sea urchins. I carefully touched the sea urchin's spines and let them wrap around my finger like chopsticks grabbing a piece of food as it tried to figure out what I was and why I was intruding in its domain. Neither of my children were interested in touching anything in the tanks.

We went outside the visitor's center and followed a path to the shore of Padilla Bay, leading to a tunnel under the road leading north out of the town of Bay View that opened onto a lookout platform hanging off the overgrown cliff above the shore of the bay, supported by a pair of concrete towers resting on the muddy beach just above the water. We climbed down the spiral staircase and spread out on the beach. The tide was high and rising, threatening to inundate even the narrow few meters of damp land between the water and the cliff, but not fast enough to impact our brief stay on the beach. The water on the shallow bay was smooth as glass in the calm morning. I could see a plume rising from an oil refinery on the peninsula across the bay, and to the north lumpy islands rose above the water, hanging at the edge of the horizon as I stood on the beach.

We ate lunch with the Stone family and in the afternoon we carved off a smaller group to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Christmas show in Seattle. This group comprised of me, my father-in-law, my siblings-in-law Tristan and Jessica, my nephew Caleb, and Calvin. (Calvin denied that he had agreed to this event, perhaps because we didn't fully explain that it also involved a non-trivial drive to Seattle and we interpreted his non-committal grunt as assent.) I ended up driving my in-laws' Toyota Highlander (because no one else wanted to drive in, or park in, Seattle).

I might have been less overconfident in my ability to navigate Seattle had I realized just how much of a traffic mess we were stumbling into. Our plan involved stopping by Shake Shack at the University Village mall, conveniently located not far east of I-5, before heading the rest of the way to Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle Center. (The map kept trying to tell me that this was part of "Queen Anne", but it's really on the hill below Queen Anne, so maybe we can call it Lower Queen Anne if we must.) After taking the exit off I-5 Google Maps took me on some secondary roads though the U District and then told me to turn onto NE 45th Street to head east down the viaduct to the mall. I've done this more than once and it's usually a perfectly reasonable route, but today was different. There were a surprising number of people wearing specific shades of purple or red walking across the crosswalk in front of me and it took me several cycles to even make it through the intersection (because I'm a reasonable California driver, unwilling to block the box unlike Seattle drivers).

By the time I realized that the big rivalry game between the University of Washington and Washington State University had just completed, and people were heading north from Husky Stadium out of the parking lots to the north of the stadium, clogging the streets and overrunning the University Village mall, as traffic cops tried blocked roads in an attempt to manage traffic, we were already committed and it was too late to turn around. The only way out was through, and I watched the clock tick forward, eating through the time I had allocated to eat supper, as we slowly inched forward, driving past the mall because that's where the traffic wanted us to go. Once we were past the mall I turned north and looped back into the mall, bringing us back into the traffic crowding through the mall. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to find a parking space (everyone was apparently driving through the mall, not actually stopping at the mall; but once we finally stepped through the door at Shake Shack the line was looping around the store. We bailed on Shake Shake and went across the parking lot to Veggie Grill, which was basically empty.

We ate a quick supper while I consulted my maps to try to figure out what the least-bad way to get to our destination. In unencumbered traffic the obvious route to Seattle Center would lead south along Montlake Boulevard, across the Montlake Bridge, and onto 520 and I-5 to Mercer. But Montlake Boulevard would take us right by Husky Stadium, the very place that everyone was trying to get away from. Google Maps gave me some partial and inconsistent traffic data and road closure data and suggested that maybe Montlake Boulevard itself was closed but maybe we could divert onto a side road into campus. This seemed like a dubious proposition, and after suffering through traffic trying to get out of the mall and onto any of the surrounding roads I gave up on the idea of going south and headed north instead, up 25th Ave NE into the neighborhood of Ravenna to NE 65th Street, which was enough of a main road that I could finally head west without being unreasonably encumbered by post-game traffic (though I still ended up stuck behind a slow-moving city bus for most of the drive west towards I-5).

West of I-5 I managed to pass the city bus and drove through the neighborhood of Green Lake and past the eponymous lake of Green Lake (visible in the dark only as a black void). At length I turned south onto Aurora Ave N, otherwise known as highway 99, which was wide enough and fast enough to nip me over Fremont and the Ship Canal, past Queen Anne and right to Seattle Center, where I had prepaid for parking in the garage next to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

We hurried across Seattle Center on foot and arrived at the arena a few minutes before the show was supposed to start. Our seats turned out to be ring-side seats several levels below ground level, in a confusing maze of hallways, none of them properly marked, lined with equipment to pack up the stage to deliver it to its next destination. We reached our seats after the show was scheduled to start; a minute after we sat down, the show began.

The first part of the show was the band's traditional Christmas show, performing Christmas songs in between vignettes with a narrator telling a story illustrated by videos of a runaway girl who finds the kindness of a stranger and reconnects with her family. The story didn't quite work for me, but I enjoyed the presentation of the music, with elaborate rock orchestration performed in a choreographed stage show with synchronized lights and fog machines and everything one would expect from an arena rock show.

Parts of the stage were motorized to elevate them above the rest of the stage, leaving a space large enough for the performers to walk under. At various points in the show this elevated platform became a theater awning, with a marquee lit up on the side of the platform in the LED screens affixed there, and the backdrop showed the rest of the theater.

The second part of the show featured an assortment of music from the band's catalog, regardless of its connection to Christmas. The first song was "In the Hall of the Mountain King", performed with two guitarists standing on gantries elevated above the orchestra seats on the arena floor, a third guitarist standing on a platform elevated in the middle of the stage, and jets of flame shooting out from the back of the stage in synch with the music. This set the tone for the rest of the show: not all of it was punctuated with real fire, but it all took the arena rock script and turned it up to eleven.

Several of the songs featured a spinning pyramid of fire in the back of the arena, behind the orchestra seats on the floor, which turned out to be right in front of our seats, close enough that I could feel the heat from the jets of fire that shot through the flaming pyramid as it spun. I couldn't tell any obvious connection between the spinning pyramid of fire and the music, but it was at least an exciting part of the stage show.

For one of the songs a singer appeared in a giant inflatable snow globe that suddenly emerged from the middle of the orchestra seats, also right in front of my seat. I cannot actually remember the song, or whether it had any obvious connection to a singer in a snow globe, but again I was impressed by the spectacle.

The show wrapped up and we shuffled out of the arena, only to get caught again in the confused maze of passages behind our seats, and then exiting via the wrong parking garage. At length I led Calvin back across Seattle Center to the car parked in the garage, then waited for the rest of our group to arrive before heading north. Actually getting out of the parking garage was a hassle, because everyone was trying to leave at once, threatening to overwhelm the local streets, but eventually I turned onto Mercer (and got stuck in the Mercer Mess again, on my way past my old Google Cloud office in South Lake Union), before merging onto the express lanes heading north on I-5 for the long drive back to my in-laws' house in Mount Vernon.

Sunday, 26th November

Southwest only operates two flights per day out of Bellingham bound for Oakland: a flight at 05:50 in the morning (an unholy hour that no one should ever consider) and a more-reasonable 17:10. We took the more reasonable flight, which meant we had plenty of time to hang out at my in-laws' house in Mount Vernon before heading into Bellingham to turn in our rental car and catch our flight.

Our flight boarded on time, but Washington wasn't quite ready to let go of us. First we waited for deicing; then by the time we taxied to the end of the runway fog had set in and we couldn't actually take off because there was no visibility. We waited for almost an hour until the fog cleared enough for us to take off. The fog appeared localized to Bellingham; by the time we flew past Seattle I had an unencumbered view of the entire city, lit by a waxing gibbous moon glinting off the waters of Puget Sound and Lake Washington.

We landed in Oakland and drove home to Santa Cruz, happy to be home after Thanksgiving in Washington.