Downtown Adventure

On Friday night, Jeremy mentioned to me that Bill Walton (a famous basketball player for those of you, like me, who didn't know who that was) was doing a book signing downtown at Powell's Books the next day and that he really wanted to go.  I was not sure that sounded like a lot of fun for the kids, but was confident that we could find fun things for us all to downtown so we decided to go.

The signing started at noon and by the time we got our bundle tied at home, drove down there, parked, and made our way to Powell's it was pretty much noon on the dot.  Our first surprise there was that the they were selling the book there for double what it was elsewhere.  Our second surprise was that the line wrapped all around the third floor and down onto the second.  We opted not to stay for the book signing but did have lots for fun exploring the rest of Powell's.  Merrick had really been wanting to find a "Missile Mouse" book and decided to use his Christmas money to buy one once we found it.  Carrigan liked browsing their large selection of Daniel Tiger, Dora the Explorer, and Pinkalious Books.

Eventually we made our way out of Powell's and onto the streets of downtown.  We stopped for lunch at a place that sells pizza by the slice and then ran a couple of errands.  We stopped by an eye glasses place for Jeremy and then hit up the downtown Target.  The Target was an adventure with several sets of escalators (and even ones for your cart-Merrick thought that was really cool).  C.C.'s favorite part was that they sell "yatas" (pinatas).

After Target we headed to the waterfront.  We walked along the water for a while when we had our catastrophe for the day.  C.C. tripped and was not able to stop herself before hitting her knees, hands, and eventually her nose and forehead on the concrete.  It was one of those slow motion moments as a parent where I could see it happening but was just not fast enough to stop it.  She was a trooper though and after just a few minutes of crying wanted to get back at it.

The highlight of the day was that we rented a surrey.  We took our surrey along both sides of the river and across two bridges.  It was fun to work all together to pedal and get where we wanted to go.  At the end of day Jeremy said we should have gotten a discount on our rental because so many people commented on how cute we were in our surrey and he was sure we had boosted their sales.

By the time was got home everyone was wiped out and ready to call it a day.  It was a great adventure and hopefully one that will not soon be forgotten.