Thursday 11 July

A couple of laid-back, quiet days in Seattle. We’re at Tulley’s again for the usual coffees. Yesterday we went to visit Bob and Joanne King. We first met the Kings when they came to Sydney in 2000. Bob was a member of the Boeing Choir which was on tour and they came to our house for lunch one day during their visit. Then, next time we were in Seattle, Bob took us on the tour through the Boeing Plant. We had a lovely lunch and spent the afternoon talking about many topics of mutual interest. Joanne is a historian and is close to publishing a book on which she has been collaborating with a colleague. We went for a late walk looking at the local gardens and I took lots of “flower pictures” as usual. Barb has been back at work since Tuesday, so she goes off for the day and works hard while we while away the hours doing whatever we feel like doing. Today after lunch we went across town to the Kubota Japanese Garden. Mr Fujitaro Kubota created the original garden in the 1930’s. He died in 1973 at the age of 94 and the council acquired the garden from the family. It’s free to walk around, covers 4 acres and is lovely and peaceful (until you bump into a bunch of kids playing hide and seek, that is!). Even though it’s school holidays, we only ran into a couple of young families.

Graham is a cat magnet!

Tonight Matt and Tricia came for a drink after dinner. They’ll be leaving for Australia Saturday next week, the day before we leave for Honolulu on our long journey home. They’ll be spending a week in Sydney before heading off to different areas, including Adelaide, outback, Uluru, etc on a three-week visit. We’ll get together during that week we get home.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to try to reorganise our bags for the cruise so we can leave one bag here until we leave for Hawaii on 21 July, because Rick will pick us up from the ship and deliver us to the airport. Sleep report: three good nights of sleep – very nice! Perhaps we should stay in Seattle!