In Which we See the Capitol

December 10, 2016

Today was a big day!  My whole host family piled in the Suburban to head to the Hunter Christmas Tree Farm to get their Christmas tree. As you might imagine, Christmas with 8 people in the family is a big deal.They start the season with a 45-minute drive to Lacey, to a Christmas tree farm that has real reindeer and  the best trees anywhere!
Today it was cold and we had to wear our matching hats.

Lacey is only a short drive from the state capitol, so on the way they took us there.  Here are Fern and me, on the road again.

Most people think that Seattle is the capitol of Washington, but it's really just the largest city. Washington became the 42nd state in the United States on November 11, 1889, and the capitol was established at Olympia. Olympia was named for its view of the Olympic Mountains.  Outside the capitol building, we stopped at the WWII monument.

It was just a short drive to the capitol building.

And here we are with Christopher on the steps of the capitol building. 

We just stopped for a short, touristy trip.  Here are some fun facts about Washington:
It was the first state to grant women the right to vote, in 1883, but it was taken away in 1887.  In 1910 women again won the right to vote, and this time it stuck.
The Grand Coulee Dam was the largest Dam in the world when it was built.
In Washington, it is illegal to use an X-Ray to fit shoes; to spit on a bus; to harass a Bigfoot; and to paint polka dots on the American Flag.  All lollipops are banned, and this is what the law says about trains: "When two trains come to a crossing, neither may go until the other has passed."

Laws are good, but some laws are just goofy. 
Hunters has a great view of Mount Rainier, but unfortunately the day was cloudy and we couldn't see it.  But here's what we did see:

While we were waiting to take our photo in the sleigh, we had free hot cocoa and lollipops. I guess Hunters hasn't heard about the Lollipop Law.  But finally it was our turn.

 After that, we were all really cold, so we loaded up the perfect tree and headed home to Kent.

 
 

In Which it Snows!

 

November 30, 2016

Today it snowed! I mean, I'm from Pennsylvania, so I didn't even hardly notice the little bit of snow, and Fern didn't even wake up, but everybody out here went crazy. It only snows here maybe once a year, and it did  not snow at all last year. But this morning we woke up to a light dusting of snow. All the kids were out trying to sled, public transportation came to a screeching halt, and people were staying home from work all over the place.

(Because there is not much snow here, they don't have snowplows, so even a little tiny bit of snow closes schools and businesses). The snow was all gone by lunchtime but they had fun while it lasted.

In Which I Meet Seattle's Little Brother

November 18, 2016
It's been a while since my last post.  We have been very busy with schoolwork, making gingerbread, and learning more fun stuff.  
This afternoon one of the kids had a heart doctor appointment in Tacoma, so my host mom told me to hop in the car and come see the city.  Fern had already seen Tacoma about a million times with the boys and Uncle, so he didn't come with us this time.

When you fly to Seattle, you fly into SeaTac airport.  The "Sea" in SeaTac is from Seattle, of course, and the "Tac" is from Tacoma.

Tacoma is a city 32 miles south of Seattle. It's like Seattle's little brother, always wanting what Seattle has and trying to outdo it.  The name "Tacoma" comes from a word the Native tribes use.  The tribe that settled in this area is the Puyallup Tribe (say Pyoo-AHL-up). Their word for the peak we call "Mount Rainier" was Tahoma, which in their language means "Snow Covered Mountain."  Tacoma is another way to say it. In the city of Tacoma, there is a museum of Glass, the LeMay Car Museum, the Tacoma Dome arena, a ferry dock, a paper mill (which stinks like CRAZY), a zoo and aquarium, and lots of other stuff.

Seattle is known for coffee.  Tacoma is too, but in a smaller way.   My host mom took us out for coffee here in Tacoma:

My favorite drink is a raspberry zebra mocha. My host mom had an eggnog latte and we took a peppermint patty mocha home for Fern.
 
One thing Tacoma has more of then Seattle: murals.  There are murals on a lot of walls.  Here I am, getting my ears scratched by the creation mural on hospital hill. 

We didn't stay long in Tacoma after the doctor's appointment. Fern and I were going to play Awale at home, and he was ahead 3 games to 2.

In Which Fern and I Have an Adventure

November 8, 2016

Today Fern and I were up early, waiting for the adventure to begin.  But when I looked outside it was POURING!  I was sad, thinking we couldn't go, but Fern told me,
"Don't worry - this is the Pacific Northwest. We're used to rain.  Besides - it never rains on outing day."

Even so, my host mom decided I needed a rain coat.  So she cut the bottom off a plastic bouquet wrapper from Trader Joe's and made it into a nifty rain poncho; with a hat to match!  Here are me and Fern, waiting patiently on the bus while my host mom and her friend Mr. Tucker loaded the residents on the bus.

 In another hour, we knew where we were going.  Seattle is the headquarters of the Boeing company. They make airplanes. In fact, if you've gone somewhere on an airplane, it was probably made by Boeing.  Boeing has a big exhibit space called the Museum of Flight, and it's all about airplanes and space travel and stuff. They have replicas of everything from the Wright Flier to the Flying Ace to the Spitfire to the Stealth Bomber to the Space Station. 
Once we got in we discovered a problem: we were going to travel all around and Christopher and Brady were carrying all of everybody's lunch and our host mom was pushing a wheelchair and couldn't carry us too, so what were we going to do?

We went by wheelchair!  My host mom's Hermanito (Little Brother) had a backpack on his wheelchair and he let us ride in it. One room was as big as a football stadium and had whole planes hanging from the ceiling.  Here we are, checking it out with Christopher:

Once we finished with the airplanes, we went to the space section. We watched a video of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, blasted off soda bottles through pressure tubes, and Fern and I got to visit with an ASTRONAUT! 

We had a great day but we were really tired. I was glad for the wheelchair backpack in the end.  My host mom said if we thought WE were tired we should try pushing a wheelchair with a grown man in it, plus a backpack with a bear and a monkey!
We kind of fell asleep on the bus, but when everyone asked us how it was Fern yawned and said, "Out of this world!"

In Which I meet My New Best Friend

November 7, 2016

My host mom has promised that tomorrow we will be going on a Grand Adventure.  She is Activities Director for a nursing home, which means she thinks up ways for the old people to have fun.  Well, they're not all OLD people exactly - there's one guy there who is younger than she is. She called him Hermanito, which is Spanish for Little Brother.  Once a week she and the residents (that's what they call the people who live in the nursing home) go on outings together.  Brady and Christopher go too, because they have several resident friends.

They go to movies and museums and sports games and Bingo halls.  Tomorrow we have an outing and I get to go along, but I won't be the only non-human on the trip.  I'M going to have a traveling Buddy of my very own!
This is Christopher and Fern:

 When I first met Fern, I said "I always thought Fern was a girl's name, like Fern in Charlotte's Web."
And Fern said
"Well, Fern's my name so I guess it can be a boy's name."
I told him I'd never met a purple monkey before, and he said,
"Well, now you have," and he smiled at me, and I smiled back, and now we're besties.

Fern looks and talks different because he's from Africa.  Christopher's Uncle from Ghana gave him Fern a couple years ago, and Fern travels all around with the family. Wherever they go, they take pictures with Fern and make picture letters for Uncle. Here they are at the ocean in Oregon. Fern's been to lighthouses and Sea Arches, zoos and aquariums. He's even been to Pennsylvania! He got to travel on a PLANE, not in a stinky envelope.

Fern has lots of great stories and he knows how to play cool games like Awale. We're going to have lots of fun in the next couple of months. Stay tuned!

In which I Learn a Tasty Lesson

November 2, 2016

OK, why am I sitting on the counter surrounded by jars?? Because my host mom made applesauce!  I bet you didn't know that Washington grows more apples than any other state.  Here is a map of the State of Washington.

Down the middle are the Cascade Mountains. They divide Washington into two very different climates. Eastern Washington is a lot like Pennsylvania, where I'm from. Summers are hot and dry with thunderstorms. Winters are Brrrr. Cold and snowy.  But West of the mountains is a whole different story. Over here it rains almost constantly nine months out of the year. The temperature rarely drops below 30 in the winter or goes above 80 in the summer.  They don't get much snow over here. Here's a fun fact: there is no poison ivy West of the mountains, and there are no poisonous snakes either.

The Cascade mountains were created by volcanoes.  You can see one of them, Mount Rainier, from just about everywhere around my host family's home. Here's Mount Rainier, looking out the car window on the way home from homeschool co-op:

Other volcanoes in the Cascade Range are Mt. Baker and Mount St. Helens.  Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 and covered the whole place in ash.  My host mom says we'll go there later. I'm excited and nervous at the same time!
 On the Olympic Peninsula to the far west of the state there is another mountain range called the Olympic Mountains.  The tallest one is called Mount Olympus.  And between the Olympics and the Pacific Ocean is the Hoh Rainforest.   They have mountains, prairies, oceans, volcanoes, and a RAIN FOREST! Isn't that WILD?

But back to the apples: The apple orchards are in Eastern Washington. Every year the harvest starts in August and lasts until November and yields more than 100 million boxes of apples, each weighing about 40 pounds.
Every single Washington Apple is picked by hand. There are no harvest machines to pick apples. My host dad once had a job picking apples. He says it's hard, even if you don't fall off the ladder. Which he did.
 
We went out to the store and got stickers for my travel journal from every apple we found that said "Washington Apple" on it.  I bet if you go to your grocery store you can find a bunch of different kinds of Washington apples. How many can you find? I bet you can't find as many as me!

Today my host mom had some time and so she made applesauce. I helped her, and the jar in front of me is MINE!

In Which I find Out More of the Basics

November 2, 2016
 My host family has 15 pets.  Most of them are just for fun, but the chickens actually help out.  They have three hens: two Americaunas and one Barred Plymouth Rock. The Americaunas lay green eggs!  It's fun going out in the morning and collecting eggs for breakfast. But this morning when they went out there were THIS many eggs:

My host mom says that means somebody hasn't been doing his job, because each chicken only lays one egg per day.

Since the kids don't go away to school, they have to do PE at home too.  Other than running the dog, jumping on the trampoline, and hiking, five of them take karate...

...and five are on puppet team at their church.  Puppet team is COOL!  They have all sorts of puppets and put on blacklight puppet shows.  The team used to compete but they kept on winning all the prizes so they were asked to just do exhibitions instead.  Here's me with my new friends. 

The blue guy is Drago and the pink one is his sister Lucy.  My host brother Ben (15)  is Lucy's head and controls the mouth, eyebrows, and ears, and his best friend Harrison is Lucy's hands.  That's Brady in the front.  His Funzle is singing some weird song. Here's a video of one of their blacklight songs:

 

In Which I Learn That Homeschool = Home's Cool

November 1, 2016

OK, so the first thing you need to know about my host family is that they are a bit unusual. Yesterday I noticed right away that there were school buses running all over the place and kids crowding on down at the corner but none of the younger kids in my host family were awake yet.

That's because they homeschool. Their mom teaches them at home.  They come out and eat breakfast and then they do their lessons. Most kids have nightmares about showing up for school in their pajamas, but this is the normal way they do their morning schoolwork.
They play for a while and have lunch and then do some more lessons.
They don't always do school at home. Here are Ben, Brady and Christopher doing their history work at the coffee shop (not in their pajamas).

One day a week they go to Homeschool Co-op. This is where a bunch of homeschooling families get together and all their kids have a regular school day. The Co-op my host family goes to has about 100 kids.  They have classes, recesses, and lunch lunch; do experiments, learn art, and go on field trips. My host mom is the high school teacher. The students in her class are 8th grade to 12th grade, 13-17 years old. They call their class "Rhetoric," and all week they do TONS of hard homework to prepare for class.  Here is some of the rhetoric class writing genus and difference charts on the board:

 

 They get grades for all that work. At night my host mom grades their work...sometimes with Toby on her lap.

 At first I thought this was a really funny way to do school, but it's not so bad once you get used to it.

In Which We Take A Little Detour

Date: October 29, 2016
Location: VA Hospital, Seattle, WA

I was pretty tired when I arrived last night, so I greeted the family and went right to bed.  My host mom got me up early this morning to see Seattle.  Seattle is the city most people think of when they hear "Washington," but it's not the capitol. I didn't know that.  The capitol is in Olympia, about an hour South of Kent. She said we'll go there later. I'll put up pictures.

But Seattle is an interesting city. My host mom volunteers as a chaplain at the VA Hospital in Seattle every Saturday. I asked her what a chaplain was, and she said it's like a pastor without a church. She says she provides spiritual support. I think that means she prays with people and gives them communion if they want it and smiles and holds a lot of people's hands.

Anyway, she said the best view of Seattle is from Beacon Hill, where the VA Hospital sits, so she took me with her. But we ended up taking a little detour.

On the way from the parking garage to the hospital, I had a little trouble with my eye.  It must have come loose in the envelope and it fell off. It didn't hurt, really, but just try looking around through one eye!  My host mom said she understood, because she is blind in one eye too.  The same eye!  That made me feel better.  The only thing she had in her purse was glitter glue but nothing to hold the eye on while the glue dried, so she took me to the emergency room.

 Here I am waiting for the nurses. We stopped at Starbucks first.

Once the nice nurses patched me up, we went upstairs to the dialysis floor.  My host mom visits a very special man up there named Pastor Brown.   She sits with him while he has his treatments and they talk and laugh and then they pray together.  They hold hands to pray.  My hands were kind of small so I guarded the TV remote while they were praying.

See these bracelets my host mom is wearing?  They were made in Kenya and are called Rafiki bracelets.  Rafiki is the Swahili word for "Friend". There are lots of people from Kenya around here and it is helpful to speak some Swahili.

After we finished with Pastor Brown we went to look out at the city. Here it is:

Seattle is nicknamed "the Emerald City" and you can see why/  Everything is so green here.  Washington State is "The Evergreen State" and you can also see why that is...

Introductions

October 28, 2016
Hi!
I'm Bailey the Bear, and this is my travel blog.  I come from Pennsylvania, where I lived with my friend Ashely.  In October I said a tearful goodbye to Ashley and all her friends at school in New Britain, and settled into a very uncomfortable envelope to travel across the country to Kent, Washington.  Phew.  This is about as far away from home as a bear can get!

I am staying with Ashely's cousin's family for a few months before I travel again, and we are having  great adventures and learning lots of cool stuff. I've been writing in my journal but it's using up a lot of pages and I kept getting glue from the pictures and stuff on the papers.  So my host mom (Ashley's cousin) is helping me set up a blog to keep up with my travels.

First, meet my host family, the Carsons:

Wow. When I arrived and they opened the envelope that was a LOT of people looking at me.  And my clothes were all rumpled from being in the stuffy envelope, and it didn't smell so great either.  But they were excited to meet me.  Let me tell you about them:
My host dad has a long mustache.  He is a computer guy for a concrete company in Seattle.
The oldest son, Corwin, is 22. He's a horseback riding instructor and has a degree in computer animation.
Next in the back row is Ben. He is 15 and spends a lot of time doing school work, reading books out loud over the phone to girls in his class, and playing his cajon, a drum like a box you sit on.
Eli has a beard. He is 20, is also a horseback riding instructor, and is an English major in college.
Bethany is 17 and is a senior in high school. Pretty much all she does is school work. And drawing. And some swing dancing.
That's my host mom, Ashley's cousin Debbe.  She is a teacher and a chaplain, and she works as an Activity Director for a nursing home, whatever that means.
There's me and my very own travel buddy friend Fern.  You'll read about him in another post.
In front are Christopher (11) and Brady (13). They are in junior high and they like to jump on the trampoline, swim in the river, and play computer games. Christopher wants to be a wildlife conservation officer in Russia and he loves wolves and learning Russian. He does karate with his dad, Eli, and Bethany.  Brady draws dragons and performs on puppet team with Ben and Bethany and Corwin.     

Now that you know all of us, I'll start my stories: