Sammamish Summer - Travel & the Fourth of July

Thanks to COVID, Dave was teaching his summer term virtually and we were able to head to Seattle a little earlier than normal! Unfortunately our travel out wasn't very smooth due to a booking problem. I wasn't able to check in to our flight online, and when I tried to call the help desk it essentially told me the hold queue was so long I would never reach anyone. That meant we had to sort things out at the airport, and during that time they started giving our seats away to standby passengers. Ahh!

Dave rushed through security alone to get to the gate as fast as possible to start fixing things, which left me with 4 kids, 4 backpacks, 3 carry-on suitcases, 1 diaper bag, and 1 stroller. I was a disaster! It was good our pool trips had given me so much practice at moving a bunch of kids and stuff from Point A to Point B. When we got to the gate we found out that all our seats were gone except one and they could only rebook us in middle seats scattered around the plane. We told them that wouldn’t work, but they wouldn’t move things around. Once we got on the plane though, the attendants realized putting our kids in middle seats for a 4 hour flight all spread out was a bad idea and they helped us get back near each other. The rest of our flight was pretty uneventful, thank goodness!

We should have had a middle seat for Griffin before the booking fiasco, but in the end we were happy to just be sitting next to each other. Poor Griff had to have his naps on the floor though. 

We made it to Sammamish in time to celebrate the Fourth! The firework show on the lake was cancelled, but the kids had fun just doing sparklers, fountains and flowers in the driveway.

After the kids were in bed, I went out on the boat with my parents to watch smaller shows happening on the docks all around the lake. Some of them were pretty impressive! We also saw a police boat attempt an ambush, since fireworks this size are actually illegal.