East Coast, Day Six: In NYC. The hotel has a nice restaurant—somewhat too nice for a passel of antsy children—but the girls manage to hold it together until the very end of the meal. Our main destination today is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anya’s particularly interested in it because her mother-daughter book club recently finished “The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”, which largely takes place at the Met. We are a wee bit disappointed to learn that none of the exhibits mentioned in the book are still on display. (In some cases, they were pure fabrications).
Still, it’s impossible to not find something interesting at the Met. We hang a right into the Egyptian exhibit (under the influence of yet another book, “The Red Pyramid”). Bree soon loses interest in hieroglyphics and sarcophagi, and is flailing around by the time we reach the gallery containing the Temple of Dendur. This, at last, is an exhibit Bree can appreciate: a wide open space suitable for running madly around.
We have lunch at the American Wing Cafe where, on a day when it’s very hot outside, the girls all want to have chicken noodle soup. There’s a fountain there in the enclosed courtyard, and all the girls ask Jan for coins to throw in. Bree gleefully pitches her coin in, but Anya and Liya fake their throws—they want to keep the coin. The final exhibit we see is Big Bambu, a temporary structure constructed from bamboo on the roof of the museum. Angela gives her camera to Liya so that she can occupy herself while we walk around. Jan looks at the camera card later and wonders why there are 80 pictures of bamboo.
We go to the Crocs flagship store, and all three girls end up with new pairs of crocs. They happily wear their new shoes out of the store. We make our way back to Central Park and have ice cream, then head to midtown for a quick coffee with Jan’s old school roommate, Tolomy. He hadn’t had a chance to meet any of our children yet, so it’s nice to be able to introduce them to him. We end the day with a nice Japanese dinner at Blue Ribbon Sushi, just around the corner from the hotel.
East Coast, Day Seven: Traffic slog to Connecticut. We have breakfast at the hotel restaurant again, at a table with a stunning view over the Central Park on a perfect summer day. We again have our hands full enforcing some reasonable decorum. At one point the waiter brings everyone a small sampler of a blueberry soy milk smoothie. Anya promptly sticks her index finger in, coating it with deep purple goop.
The girls want to go back to the Heckscher Playground in Central Park, this time with bathing suits so they can run through the sprinklers and splash in the water. While Jan watches over them, Angela goes for a run through the park. She gets lost, and her phone’s somewhat inaccurate GPS sends her on some wrong turns before she makes her way back. Meanwhile, Jan’s checking his own phone to watch the evolving traffic situation on the I-95 we’ll take in the afternoon to Connecticut. The estimate driving time is quickly getting longer and longer, meaning traffic is getting really backed up, so we hurry through a quick lunch and load up the minivan.
As we pull on the West Side Highway, Jan gives the girls a speech how they need to give plenty of warning if they need to go to the bathroom. This speech seems to have the opposite of the intended result—Liya immediately says she needs to use the bathroom. So we spend the first half hour of the drive looking for a reasonable place to get off the highway. The traffic is indeed bad, but we keep tossing snacks and candy towards the back of the car and queuing up more DVDs. The girls keep asking to see episodes from the first season of The Muppet Show which, at least, is amusing for us to listen to up front.
By the time we arrive at Old Lyme, the girls are pretty beat. We arrive at the home of Jan’s stepmother, Marlee, in time for dinner with her and Chris, who arrived the day before. Marlee hasn’t seen the girls since she came to Seattle two summers ago, and they’ve grown quite a bit since then. After dinner we head to our rooms at the nearby Old Lyme Inn.
East Coast, Day Eight: Watch Hill, RI. Although it’s a holiday weekend, Chris and Jan want to visit Watch Hill, a tourist area in the southwest corner of Rhode Island, just over the border from Connecticut. Watch Hill was a regular stop on Miksovsky/Kolozsvary summer vacations years ago. Anya’s rather excited to see Rhode Island, since she’d researched it for her second grade “State Convention” project.
To beat the crowds, we get an early start (helped along by the fact that all the girls are now getting up pretty early on Eastern time). The town’s main attraction for children is an old carousel at the end of the strip of shops, and we’re there early enough that we have to wait for it to open. We point out to the girls that, during the ride, they can try to grab little metal rings from a dispenser as they pass by; the person who gets the final brass ring gets a free ride. During their first ride, Liya’s proud to be the kid who gets the brass ring. Anya and Liya make a number of further rides. On one ride, Liya gets the brass ring again and then, since no one else goes on the next ride, she naturally gets the brass ring again!
When we’ve had enough of carousel rides, we walk over to the adjacent beach and settle in to spend the rest of the morning on the beach. The ocean’s not particularly warm, but Jan and Liya steel themselves to go in anyway. Jan pops back to the shops to bring back lunch from the St. Clare Annex. Uncle Chris joins the girls for a round of sand castle building.
When we’re done with the beach, we have to walk past the carousel, and so end up making a few more rides. Anya’s happy to finally get the brass ring too. We enjoy some ice cream from St. Clare’s, then do some shopping. The girls pick out some nice (if overpriced) summer clothes, and Bree gets a cute pink hair scrunchy. When Jan tries it out on Bree, the other customers in the shop all say, “Awww”, and the canny cashier says, “Well, now you have to get it.” The last shopping stop is at the Candy Box, where Jan and Chris remember spending money as kids on candy sticks and penny candy. The girls are predictably happy to spend a long time picking out candy.
Dinner is back at the Hideaway in Old Lyme. We’re very happy to be joined by Marlee’s sister, Brooke, who the girls had a chance to meet when Brooke visited Seattle in 2008.
East Coast, Day Nine: Fourth of July at Mystic Seaport. We’re preparing for another day at the beach, but decide that what we really want to do is visit Mystic Seaport. Chris and Jan had been there many times as kids, when Marlee’s sister Anne worked at the Seaport’s bookstore. Angela had been there once before years ago, but it was in the middle of winter, and it’d be nice to see it in the summer. We’ve been warned about holiday crowds, but the alternative—a day at a Connecticut beach—threatens even bigger crowds. We gamble that more people will spend the Fourth at the beach, and head to the Seaport.
The bet pays off. We arrive around 10:00 am, and there are no crowds to speak of; we’re able to get tickets and walk right in. All the small buildings around the seaport are open, so we pick a direction at random. One of the first buildings we visit is the shipwright’s, where a nice woman is getting ready to steam small pieces of wood and bend them into mast hoops. These will hold the sail of a catboat against the mast. The next building contains the Australia, a very old sailboat that has been displayed in its damaged state so that visitors can see the construction of the hull. For some reason, the girls love this exhibit. Bree, in particular, runs up and down the ramps and stairs through the ship, and insisting on running in two more times during the day to repeat this activity.
Jan and Chris are happy to revisit the training ship Joseph Conrad, which serves as a dormitory for the seaport’s sailing camps. Jan and Chris had gone to the sailing camp when they were young, and it’s fun to see the ship again. The ship’s a bit worse for wear, and the Seaport has had to make so many repairs to the hull that they try very hard not to move it much at the dock. This is a shame, since one of the more interesting activities at the camp was trying to arrange all the campers on one side of the ship, then have everyone run to the other, and back and forth, until the huge ship began to slowly rock. Er, they don’t do that anymore, says one volunteer on the ship.
We come across a building with projects for kids to do, including paint. The painting materials on hand are ostensibly so kids can make paintings of seaport scenes, but the girls just want to paint whatever comes to mind. Bree mixes all the colors together, and uses the resulting gray to paint the entire sheet of paper. Angela calls the work, “Study in Gray”.
We have lunch at the seaport’s main restaurant, the Galley. A sign on the front says, “Quality food, Quickly served”. Chris suggests that the sign should add, “Prepared by teenagers, At minimum wage”. The place has been substantially upgraded from the time when Jan’s stepbrother Stephen worked there for a summer, but it still serves traditional New England fried stuff. We’re happy we beat the lunch crowd. We didn’t count on Anya wolfing down her lunch, part of Liya’s, and part of Bree’s, and still wants more—we have to wait for a really long time just so Anya can have another corn dog.
All morning long we keep seeing a horse-drawn carriage trotting around the seaport, and each time Bree points and says she wanted to ride it. We now make our way over to the place where you can board the carriage, but the carriage never arrives. We’re trying to figure out what’s up, when we suddenly hear a fife and drum corps nearby. An old-style Fourth of July parade comes walking across the seaport grounds—with the horse-drawn carriage near the head of the parade. We tell Bree she’ll have to wait for her ride.
We make a harbor tour on the 1917 motor launch Resolute, and it’s a great day to be out on the Mystic River. We can see the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan up on a drydock as shipbuilders work on making her seaworthy again (after being idle for something like a century). Out of the water, the ship is absolutely huge, maybe three to four stories tall to the deck.
Back on land, Bree finally gets her carriage ride around the seaport. She will later describe this as her favorite part of the day. We walk around the deck of the Amistad, where Liya gets to see larger versions of the same kind of wooden mast hoops we saw being made earlier in the day. We walk through the Morgan and learn a bit about the work they’re doing on her. We finish up the trip with ice cream, then a walk through the gift store. A woman nicknamed the “Lobster Lady” is on hand to talk about lobster fishing. Anya peppers her with questions, and the nice woman rewards Anya with a hand-made lobster net.
Dinner is another barbecue at Marlee’s, and afterwards Jan shows the girls Marlee’s old family photo albums. There are some photos from the late 70s showing Jan and Chris visiting Mystic Seaport on a tour pretty much like the one we just did today. Marlee gives Bree early birthday presents, including a little yellow Beanie Baby bear which Bree instantly hugs. We say goodbye to Chris, who’s heading back to NYC early tomorrow.
East Coast, Day Ten: Back to NJ. After breakfast, Marlee joins us at the Old Lyme Inn, and we drive down to visit the cemetery where Jan’s dad is buried. Mirek passed away 18 years ago, so the girls never had a chance to meet their paternal grandfather; the visit is partially a way to round out their understanding of the family history. When the headstone was laid, it sat at the edge of the cemetery, but in the past 18 years, the cemetery has grown past the grave’s location and deeper into the woods. The gravesite is still a nice shady spot, and the cemetery is really very peaceful on a sunny morning like this. We explore a little bit more of the old cemetery, which has graves dating back to the early 1700s. We find a Revolutionary War lieutenant who fought at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. Thank you, sir.
Before leaving Old Lyme, we have brunch with Marlee at the Morning Glory Café, new since the last time we were here. It’s owned by a Laotian family who were helped to the U.S. by some local churches. The menu includes a mixture of New England and Laotian items; the egg rolls are spectacular. We drop Marlee back off at the Inn and say our goodbyes.
Our return trip to NJ takes us along the tree-lined Merritt Parkway, a slightly longer but much nicer drive than the jam-packed I-95 we took up on Friday. We arrive at our hotel in time for the girls to take a long swim in the pool before dinner. We meet up with Angela’s cousins Albert and Melissa, and Albert’s girlfriend Jessica, at Sushi Palace in Edison. Bree falls asleep shortly before we get there, so we take turns holding her until she finally wakes up. She doesn’t say anything for a long time, until she sees a tamago (egg) sushi go by, at which point she exclaims, “I like that one!”
At the end of the meal, Albert pulls a Taiwanese check-fu move and grabs the check before we have a chance to offer to help pay. Not to be outdone, when Angela’s saying goodbye to everyone, she gives Jessica a goodbye hug—and surreptitiously drops cash into Jessica’s purse. Albert doesn’t discover the ploy until we’re already in the minivan and pulling away.
East Coast, Day Eleven: Back home. The temperature soars over 100, so we’re happy to be heading back to the cooler Northwest. In the nine full days we were on the East Coast, we’ve traveled through four states, stayed in six places, and seen four relatives and seven dear friends (plus four new kids). For such a complex trip with so many moving parts, everything went off smoothly—frankly, far more smoothly than we were expecting! We’re looking forward to coming back in another few years.
Sabriya is three years old today! Her party is tomorrow, but she opens our presents to her this afternoon. Her older sisters are so excited that it’s impossible for them to not “help” Bree unwrap the presents.
Sabriya’s Watermelon Birthday Party. In the late morning, a small number of Bree’s friends (Towa, Nora, Josie, and Jack) and their parents join us for a birthday party. The party has a watermelon theme just for fun (and not because Bree has some special love of watermelon). We have plenty of actual watermelon on hand, along with watermelon-themed plates, watermelon taffy, and so on. For the party, Siri baked an amazing cake that looks like a slice of watermelon. We also have a craft activity to make watermelon maracas: paper plates folded in half, stapled with some watermelon seeds inside, and colored on the outside to look like watermelon slices. (We found this activity on the site of the National Watermelon Promotion Board.) All the kids spend a great deal of time in the wading pool on the backyard deck. The weather is absolutely perfect—sunny and breezy—and all the kids have a great time.
We seem to be visiting lots of wading pools this summer. Tonight’s visit was to Wallingford Park to meet up with a bunch of other families with kids in Liya’s grade.
We cross the sound to visit to the home of Anya’s classmate, Maile, who lives in Poulsbo, WA. Another classmate, Kaila, joins us with her mom on the trip. We spend most of the day there, and the girls have a great time exploring the woods and playing in the pool. The highlight is definitely the treehouse—an elaborate fairytale cottage way up in a pair of large trees. Maile and her family are moving to Taiwan soon and will be gone at least a year, so it’s nice to spend time with them before they go.
Liya and Anya finish their one week Art Camp hosted by the Seattle Art Museum. We’re not sure why, but this camp tires them out more than school does – it must be fairly intense! The camp end with an art show, including a demonstration of shadow puppets they made.
Alaska, Day One. Cozi shuts down for a week each summer, and this year we were looking for a vacation destination that didn’t require flying with all the kids again. Angela came up with the idea of doing a cruise from Seattle to Alaska and back. Various friends and relatives have come through Seattle over the past twenty years to do this cruise, and while Angela herself did it some 16 years ago, Jan’s never done it, and we thought the kids were finally old enough. (Conveniently enough, Bree just turned three: old enough to participate in the kids’ program on board.) The trip is also a small Chen family reunion: Angela’s parents, her brother Johnny, and his family are coming too.
The departure is straightforward but fun. We take a cab across town to embark Holland America Line’s ms Rotterdam. There’s an enjoyable sense of disorientation as we make our ways to our rooms—lots of levels and passages to explore. Our family group has three nice rooms close together on the same deck. The girls are happy to be close to their slightly younger cousins Anthony and Brian. From our little verandahs, we watch the ship pull away from the berth and slowly maneuver out into Puget Sound. It’s an absolutely gorgeous day to be out on the water.
After a quick snack, we take the girls up to the pool up on top. It’s quite nice, and Anya and Liya splash about the main pool like fish. Bree hasn’t taken swimming lessons yet (she’ll start in August), so we’re trying her out in inflatable water wings, which she loves but doesn’t quite completely trust yet to keep her afloat.
Dinner is at the more elegant sit-down dining room at the back of the ship, where we have a great view of Whidbey Island and the other parts of Puget Sound as we head into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The food itself is nothing remarkable, but we weren’t expecting much from the food on board. Much more exciting to the girls is returning to the room and discovering that the cabin steward has left on our bed a sort of towel origami creation in the shape of a cute stingray (with little paper eyes on top). This sets a pattern for each night of the cruise. It actually makes the girls look forward to bedtime because they want to see what new towel animal will be waiting for us in the room.
Alaska, Day Two: At sea. After breakfast, we bring all three girls up to the kids’ program, Club HAL (for “Holland America Line”). Bree’s a bit nervous about being dropped off, but she relaxes a bit when she sees that she’ll be in the same group as Liya. They settle down to a craft project and we slip out. Since Anya’s eight, she gets to be in an older group, but pretty quickly starts to feel a bit seasick. We’re now out in the open ocean off the western side of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and there’s a bit of a swell. Angela takes Anya back to our room while Jan gets her some Dramamine from the ship’s doctor.
We take turns enjoying massage appointments at the spa: Jan in the morning, Angela in the afternoon. There’s a lot more time at the pool, and the kids enjoy the fact that the sea swell causes the pool water to slosh back and forth. Anya is starting to feel better, and says it feels especially nice to be in the water; her seasickness disappears completely.
Alaska, Day Three: Juneau. We wake up as we’re heading up the Inside Passage to Juneau. Jan’s in the middle of brushing his teeth when he sees a pod of humpback whales out the window, so he spends several minutes on the verandah looking through binoculars with a mouth full of toothpaste. The girls and their cousins spend the morning at the kids’ club, while Angela does a Pilates class.
Juneau is just around the corner from the end of the Mendenhall Glacier. Getting off at Juneau, we ride a bus to the small airport for a helicopter ride that does a pass over the glacier and then lands on it. During the ride, the pilot comments that today’s weather is amazing, the best in over a week. He points out that the nearby peaks of the Mendenhall Towers aren’t normally visible—but are today.
We spend a short while walking around on the glacier. Our guide points out a fast-running stream of glacial meltwater, and lies down on the ice so he can help himself to some. Anya and Liya have great fun doing this themselves. The girls are also fascinated by the deep blue water-filled holes in the glacier’s surface, and they take turns dropping bits of rock into the holes. Anya picks up a small piece of granite from the glacial moraine to take home as a souvenir. We get back on the helicopter and fly down past lush green alpine meadows to land again at the airport.
Back in Juneau proper, we reunite with the rest of the Chens and ride up a gondola to the top of nearby Mt. Roberts. (Dr. Chen stays in town, since he’s not one for heights.) At the top of the tramway, there’s a little nature station set up where a ranger has pointed a telescope down at a nearby tree. We each take a look through the telescope to see an eagle’s nest and two brown eaglets. Mama eagle perches nearby keeping watch. There’s a short nature trail around the top of the mountain, and even though it’s high up, we end up shedding some layers due to the warm sun. Someone points out that there are salmonberry bushes along the trail. Anya and Liya happily pick some, unconcerned that the berries are still tart and underripe.
After dinner back on the ship, Jan puts Bree down to sleep while Angela takes Anya and Liya up to the kids’ club for a movie night. Anya’s has become fast friends with three girls her age in her club group, so she’s eager to spend more time there.
Alaksa, Day Four: Hubbard Glacier. In the morning, Anya is eager to go back to the kids’ club so she can reunite with her new friends. The ship is sailing into Disenchantment Bay, but it’s quite foggy, and we’re wondering if we’ll be able to even see the Hubbard Glacier at the head of the bay. Our weather luck holds again, though, and the fog lifts in the early afternoon. It’s cold and raining a bit, but from the foredeck we have a good view of the 300’ glacial wall of blue, white, and gray. We hear loud cracks from time to time. Everyone’s waiting for a chunk of ice to calve off the glacier. When one finally does, it drops into the bay to create a large slow-motion wave. Everyone cheers. We stick around long enough to see a few more icebergs calve from the glacier.
The rest of the day follows with a range of shipboard activities. In the mid-afternoon, three members of a Tlingit village from Yakutat, a village on Disenchantment Bay, give an interesting talk on the local culture. Angela, her dad, Anya, and Liya attend a short class to learn how to create an origami picture frame. By the end of the day, the girls are all exhausted. They’re delighted by tonight’s folded-towel creation: a monkey swinging from a curtain rod.
Alaska, Day Five: Sitka. We ride tenders from the ship to the Sitka pier and then go separate ways for the morning. Angela’s brother Johnny and his wife take their kids, plus Anya and Liya, on a “semi-submersible” glass bottom boat tour of Sitka’s harbor. They get a good view of cold water ocean life: kelp, moon jellyfish, sea cucumbers, and huge sunflower sea stars (instead of five legs, they have something like 20).
While they’re doing that, Jan and Angela get to see much the same sea life up a little closer on a dry suit snorkel trip. We’ve never worn dry suits before, and it’s an almost comically complicated outfit: fleece pajama-like suits, dry suits everyone has to squeeze into, neoprene hoods, thick neoprene gauntlets, and finally a mask, snorkel, and fins. At least it all works; when we walk into the frigid water, only our hands end up getting cold. We swim through a shallow field of eel grass, and then a kelp forest. The water’s a bit murky, so the most interesting place to see the sea life is the shallows right next to a rocky outcropping. There’s quite a bit of color: purple pinto abalone, green sea lettuce, bright orange seaweed, black rockfish, silver herring (?), and pink feather duster anemones. The latter disappear when you touch them—poof!
Regrouping in downtown Sitka, we have lunch at Agave, a Mexican restaurant on Lincoln Street (the main drag). We make a quick tour of the Russian Orthodox St. Michaels cathedral, a holdover from the days when Alaska was a Russian fur trading outpost. In the afternoon, Angela takes Liya and Bree shopping in Sitka. They pick out a necklace for Liya, and a Russian matryoshka doll for Bree. Bree immediately loves the doll. (She will spend the rest of the trip taking it apart and putting it back together.)
Meanwhile, Jan and Anya go sea kayaking. We have unaccountably good weather: the clouds have lifted, and Sitka is enjoying a rare sunny summer day. (We had no idea that, compared to these southeast Alaskan cities, Seattle has great weather!) A motor launch takes our kayaking group to a small bay between two small spruce-covered islands, where we land at Camp Coogan, a little floating dock and warming house. We board a two-person kayak, and join three other kayaks to form a group led by a guide, Dennis. He leads us out of the sheltered bay to a small cove called “The Donut”: the cove is almost perfectly circular, with a circular rock in the middle of it.
By this time, Anya is less interested in paddling the kayak than looking at the kelp in the water. She pulls up a long strand of kelp, and drags it behind the kayak for twenty minutes. We finally lose it, so Anya contents herself with picking up smaller pieces of seaweed and using them to decorate the top of the kayak. We paddle south to an estuary where a freshwater river meets the saltwater bay, then along a coastline past a series of old barges. Some are leftover hulks that previously carried timber, other smaller barges are still active as summer homes. The launch brings us back to the Sitka pier just in time for the last couple cruise ship tenders.
Once back on board, we watch from our verandah as they winch the tenders back onto the ship. We all go back up to the pool for some swimming. The girls are excited to see that the poolside grill is serving tacos for dinner, so we eat dinner by the pool. The sun is out as the ship pulls away from Sitka. Taking a walk on the rear deck, Jan, Bree, and Liya see some whale spouts far off. Liya runs off to get Angela so she can finally get a chance to see some whales, but by the time Angela comes out onto the deck, the whales are gone.
Alaska, Day Six: Ketchikan. Another perfect sunny day! We disembark and walk the short distance to take in a lumberjack show, a demonstration of competitive Olympic-style “timbersports” events: the underhand chop, the standing block chop, the hot saw, etc. The four demonstrators are indeed big, burly guys decked out in flannel and suspenders. In the middle of the show, one of the guys does some chainsaw carving, producing a small funny-looking rabbit. As he works on it, he “accidentally” cuts off the top of the rabbit, which produces a lot of laughs—and then surprise when he shows that the part he cut off is actually a simple wooden chair. He tries to sit on it, but it’s much too small for him, so he asks if there’s any small child in the audience who would like it. Jan waves Bree’s arm for her, and the lumberjack picks Bree out of the audience and invites us to come down in front. Bree is overawed by the crowd, and does a quick wave to the audience as the lumberjack requests, then hugs Jan and buries her head in his shoulder. Luckily, the small chair is carved from balsam fir, and light enough for us to carry home.
We board a bus for the second half of our tour, which takes us to Totem Bight State Park. Along the way, the bus guide comments on how beautiful the weather is. We follow the guide through the small state park, listening to explanations of the large number of totem poles displayed there.
Tonight’s towel origami creation was our favorite one of the trip.
Alaska, Day Seven: Victoria, BC. Anya wants to spend as much time at Club HAL as possible, and Bree and Liya spend the morning there as well. Since it’s our last full day on board, Angela and her parents watch a small farewell show in the ship’s theater. Right after lunch, we go to the photographer’s studio on board for a family photo session. The photographer, a perky Romanian woman, alternates between rearranging us, then snapping away. Whenever she’s taking pictures, she’s shouting at everyone to smile, as well as blasting “We are Family” by Sister Sledge at top volume. Keeping all the kids in the frame with faces pointed at the camera is an exhausting task.
Jan spends the afternoon in the pool with Liya and Bree. Bree’s finally come to trust her inflatable water wings, and enjoys the sensation of floating on her own in the water. Angela spends a good portion of the afternoon packing, as we need to have most of our luggage out and ready for pick-up by this evening. When we’re done packing, there’s an odd sense of calm—we’ve never been packed so far in advance of actually leaving someplace.
The ship makes a stop for the evening at Victoria, BC. We take a cab to our favorite bistro there, Le Bon Rouge. Bree likes her baked macaroni, Angela loves her smoked cod, and Jan and Liya have great steak frites. We do some quick shopping: Liya picks out a small stuffed orca, and Anya gets yet another small, soft Canadian-themed soccer ball to the collection she’s had since she was a toddler. Anya’s anxious to complete the shopping quickly and get back to the ship so she and Liya can catch the end of Club HAL’s last movie night.
Return to Seattle. We wake up back at Pier 91 in Seattle. The Chens all have a flight back in the mid-afternoon, which gives them just enough time to come back to our home for a final brunch together.