Brandon and Angela flew into town on Tuesday, December 20th. We picked them up from the airport and then immediately took off on a road trip through December 23rd! We brought Alex along on the journey to keep Joseph company.
We drove along the Gorge and then cut over to Tri Cities where we stopped for lunch.
Then we drove to Moses Lake to the house of Holly and Barry, where we visited with them and with Grandma Palmer.
Then we drove to our rental home in Leavenworth. The next day we enjoyed the rental house hot tub, played games, played in the snow, and toured Leavenworth.
The girls and I loved the Christmas store!
It was fun for me re-visit Leavenworth (which I hadn't seen since I was a child) after visiting the Bavarian villages it is modeled after. It looks very authentic!
I recognized this pole as similar to one that we saw near the Neuschwanstein castle. Here is the Leavenworth version
And the Germany version
Alex took a family picture of us. Notice the snowy, slushy roads! It was really cold.
Everyone humored me and we visited the tiny, eccentric, but still very interesting nutcracker museum in town. The tour starts with a hilariously dated video about the making of nutrackers.
Then we looked at the thousands of nutrackers from around the world.
And then, the next day, back on the road!
We traveled through the beautiful pass just before a storm hit.
We spent a night in Seattle and visited some of the fun tourist spots.
While the rest of us toured the Space Needle, Dan drove to visit one of Prestige's buildings near Seattle.
We walked from our hotel to a downtown mall to watch Lala Land (Dan and the younger boys watched Star Wars again). On the walk back we saw the Space Needle all lit up.
The next morning we did the Underground Seattle tour.
Gum Wall was a must for a few of us, even though we were freezing and it was pouring rain!
Pike's Place Market
And then we loaded back up to fight the traffic back to Vancouver. It was a wonderful mini vacation, but we were ready to finish Christmas preparations!
