Vacation- Seattle and California

We had a great time with Marty's relatives from Germany. Kay (pronounced Kai) Susi and Danny fly into Seattle for a week of sightseeing, seafood and shopping The weather was perfect all week and we often found ourselves down at Alki Beach.
After their week here, which included going on the water taxi, monorail, visiting the Space Needle, riding The Duck, attending a Seattle Sounders soccer match, going to a Zoo concert, hiking near Mt Rainier, the underground tour of Seattle, the Museum of Flight, visits with family and much more.... we all took of for Santa Monica, CA for a bit of relaxation at the beach.

Here is Josie at the beach. She wasn't so keen on going in the water but slowly warmed up to the idea.

She did LOVE playing in the sand, though.

She also LOVED eating ice cream almost every night.

We were eating dinner one night and kids kept walking by with balloons from a different restaurant. Josie desperately wanted one. A little while later a clown was walking by and we asked him if we could buy one of his balloons. He was a rather sad clown and just said "here you go, take them all. It is my first day here. I'm from Turkey and I left my job and country to come here and be a clown." I'm not sure how he thought he would be able to support himself being a clown here. We wished him well and gave him a few dollars for the balloons and off he went. So now Josie had 6 balloons tightly tied to her wrist. Their was so much pull on the balloons that she walked around the rest of the night with her hand raised to at least shoulder level.

Danny and Josie became best of friends.

Marty has a friend that works at 20th Century Fox Studios. We got a behind the scenes tour or the facilities including seeing all the props for The Simpson's Movie.

Josie enjoyed dancing to the music every night. Thankfully a little girl about her age came over and started dancing with her. Finally someone her own age. Josie and this little girl had a ball as did everyone else who was watching them. They must have danced/run around like this for about 30 minutes. She slept well that night :)