Salmon Days

There is a festival every October in Issaquah called Salmon Days that celebrates the salmon trek up the rivers and streams to spawn. It is a very fun festival with a great parade and lots of booths and activities. It reminds me of Swiss Days at home (for all you Utahns reading this) except we got to see the actual salmon themselves struggling up a local stream on our walk back to the car! Pretty cool!That is my little man with his Aunt Crystal dangling out over the water trying to touch the salmon! (his favorite thing lately is to say "I touch it!" about pretty much everything... including the unreachable like airplanes, power lines, and salmon swimming far below in a stream!)

I have to say the low point was NO CANDY in the parade - poor Gabe got gypped after I hyped up the whole candy part of the day. Uh oh. However there was a really cool pirate float...complete with swaggering, yelling pirates smoking real cigars and setting off "cannons"! They threw out some pirate treasure and Gabe got a big, fat, silver pirate coin!! That almost made up for the lack of treats. I wish I would have gotten a picture of the pirates- they were great! Later on Ronald McDonald came along... and by Gabe's reaction you would have thought he was the Grim Reaper! He was terrified!! My little guy was shaking with fright, literally crawling up my arms to get away from that horrible clown! It was awful! Long after Ronald had walked on, Gabe kept peering fearfully down the street to make sure he wasn't coming back!! The best part of the weekend was that Eric's mom and sister Crystal came for a visit. It was Crystal's first time to Seattle so we did all the fun things for newbies! Gabe especially enjoyed being lavished with attention the whole weekend!

Oooooh! I really cool carved wooden lobster in a trap. There are a ton of neat fisherman carvings downtown on the waterfront- Gabe loves them!Gabe getting a free ride while clutching his beloved Sea Otter from Grandma!