One of the reasons for having a trip at this of the year is because I have completed yet one more orbit around the sun – it was my natal anniversary, also known as my birthday… Our first stop, after a continental breakfast, was to visit Archie McPhee – in person! The famous mail-order catalog’s physical location in the city once known as Ballard (which was annexed by Seattle 100 years ago) is actually two store fronts, separated by a parking lot. One of the stores is a repository of strange little items (rubber chickens, and those sort of things) and an odd assortment of surplus items (unfinished phones, odd electronics, &c…) The second store carries more of the larger items, and some of the smaller items as well, in a cleaner and more well lit environment. We even created a wedding registry, but it can only be visited in person at the store (we will add it to our site at some point.) We bought a few things, including a nifty surplus Royal Mail jacket…

We had lunch at Gameworks, which involved pizza, a Caesar Salad, and 30-minutes of arcade games. Sadly, there were only a handful of games that I wanted to play (Ms. Packman for instance.) and one of the only two pinball games were out of order. Jerry and I shared two games of air-hockey, a variation with two paddles each – and an automatic puck dispenser that at time would put three pucks into play.

From there we drove down to the piers, and walked around while we waited for our boat to Tillicum Village. The concept sounded great – a salmon dinner with a presentation of native dancing – but the reality was that it ended up like many of my other Friday nights: good food+dark warm room=snooze. At least I was able to survive the boat ride to and from (thanks to a couple bottles of ginger ale.) A little more interesting was a gaggle of Asian girls all dressed in the same turquoise jackets, who apparently were from San Hsin High School dance troupe – here for the Dance of Friendship (some sort of city exchange thing with Seattle.) On the way back from the island they were having fun on the deck above us…

We thought about looking into some more of the shops at the harbor, but they had already been shut – so we went back to our home base. We toyed with going out for the Simpsons movie, but decided to stay in and listen to more of the Deathly Hallows and rest.