Pies, Chocolate, Salmon, Beers, and Much Much More

We took my parents to see "Arts in the Garden" at Bellevue Botanical Garden. It was a lot of art for your lawn.

I don't have a lawn but I do have a stomach. I spotted this exotic looking truck and got involved.

An article posted in the window trumpets that Tabassum "may run the only Uzbek food truck on the entire West Coast". I got here just in time, it sounds like.

I believe we went with the samsas "savory meat and veggie hand pies with flaky crusts".

This fun flower is called an Irish Delight.

We then took the crew over to the Theo Factory Experience. We'd checked the place out once before with Zoe and it now had the Tom and Helen stamp of approval.

Cacao pods are essentially alien eggs.

We said hello to the Fremont Troll, a must in this part of town.

Now this was a fun thing that I've been wanting to do but not yet experienced: the Ballard Locks.

Here you can see the Locks, officially named after Hiram Chittenden, are what connect Lake Washington and Lake Union to Puget Sound. In the 1860s the US Navy even made plans to build a naval base on Lake Washington, which is mind blowing to me. 

Built by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Ballard Locks carry more boat traffic than any other lock in the U.S.

There was a sign warning that you may hear loud noises, which are used to try to scare away the seals and sea lions that eat all the salmon. Spoiler: it doesn't work.

Speaking of fish, there's a fish ladder.

Zeke was still in town for his work thing and was also in attendance.

I guess the locks allow some of the fresh water to spill out into the sound. Salmon can smell this water, recognize their birthplace, and are attracted to swim up a series of little steps up into the fresh water. All of these attracted salmon are what attract the sea lions to destroy them.

Lydia was pretty sad when she realized how few baby salmon survive to adulthood. It'll be ok.

It's had to tell from this picture but I saw a shiny little aquatic mammal head sneaking around right outside the locks.

While we were in the Ballard neighborhood, we tried some brewskies. Lucky Envelope Brewing is one of my favorites because they have really fun ingredients and flavors with a Chinese influence.

I hadn't been to Wheelie Pop Brewing yet so this was an exciting visit. They seemed to have a lot of European and Italian influence going on in their offerings.

This is a fun place to eat because most of the breweries don't have food in favor of these food trucks out front. So any given day you can just scope out which of the random trucks are there that day.