Saturday Night: Spokane Washington

Satruday afternoon/evening we drove over border of Montana and into Washington into Spokane.  WE all really enjoyed the drive and found it to be very beautiful.

I guess this is when we got the huckleberry shakes.

Most of the kids slept and brock read, which is unfair that this is when the picture was taken because Brock slept probably 80-90% of all the the car rides - so many times everyone was awake except Brock.

For the first time (and only 3 other times after this time), Jason got tired and I drove for an hour or so.

We were hoping to get into Spokane early enough to check out their downtown river district.  With our fault tire and the caves we were unsure if we were going to make it.  As we pulled into downtown we figured we had about an hour before sunset so we decided to forgo dinner and head straight to the river.  It was a good call because the park, river, and waterfalls were magical at dusk and in the sunset.  It was a beautiful evening.  We walked around, played on some play grounds and enjoyed the river and falls.  It was lovely, and thanks to an abundance of car snacks nobody was TO hungry.

The people on the bridge are some of our kids.

There was this cool amphitheater with big wires and lights that were really cool, so I begged the family to take pictures.

I tried to be a cool photographer and get a cool angle laying on the ground.  They all just made fun of me and told me I was embarrassing.  worth it!  I love the shot.  too bad I am not in it.

We even saw a clock tower.  Noah and Megan hated it. :) 

 

on the way back to the car I convinced them to take one more.  

We headed back to the hotel.  It was like 8:00 (but we did cross a time zone) but we hadn't had dinner AND we hadn't swam in a hotel pool or hot tub yet - something most of the kids wanted to do.  I told Jason and the big kids to figure out dinner, I was solely focused on take Dane and Eve to the pool feeding them dinner (left over from what ever Jason figured out) and putting them to bed.  As we played at the pool eventually Madison, Megan, and Noah showed up. Noah and Megan just wanted to be in the hot tub, but Mads was all about the fun and got in the pool and was the fun/cool teen with Dane and Eve.  There were also like 6 9 year old boys there on a soccer tournament and the is Dane's favorite "crowd" so he played with them.  There were many tears when we had to leave, but that was kind of the theme for Dane every time we had to leave an activity.

While I was at the pool with the kids, Jason and Brock went back out to get everyone dinner.  After, I think, 3 closed restaurants they ended up at everyone's favorite (thanks to Brock), Panda Express.  I didn't get the whole story (Jason and I got in a bit of a tiff - vacations tend to do that) but something weird happened with the bill (again) and we ended up with more food that we ordered - that is always a tender mercy for a family of 8.

The hotel messed up our room so the teens were in a totally separate room than ours, so that was nice for them and the hotel felt bad so they drastically discounted our bill, so it was a blessing all around.