Road Trip to Ikea

Sami has been designing his home theater setup and he realized that the existing light fixture in the room would interfere with the picture from the projector. Plus, it was ugly. Last weekend we went to Home Depot and looked at all of their fixtures, but he didn't find one that suited his criteria. When we got home we looked at a ton of different websites looking for various types of low profile lighting. Finally we found one he liked at Ikea. Of course the one here in Portland isn't opening for a couple more months and this fixture is one that the store doesn't ship for some reason.

So... Road trip to Ikea Seattle. It's been a long time since we went geocaching and we were expecting more good weather so we decided to combine the two. The first geocache we tried was called "Quack Islands" It sounded great. Ducks, islands, a fountain and a garden. Unfortunately we found ourselves in the parking lot of a medical center. There was a fountain, and a small garden, and a lake, but no ducks! The "islands" were small bits of greenery scattered around the parking lot. We must have spent about 40 minutes following clues around and never found the cache. And it was only supposed to be 1.5 stars out of 5. Not a good start.

Then it started raining. We decided to keep driving towards Seattle and see if the rain would let up. Sami got hungry and I told him to stop whenever he saw something he liked. We drove about 20 miles without passing any food places. Finally, in the middle of nowhere we saw a house with a giant English flag on the roof. We were hungry so we decided to stop. It was kind of an interesting little place. Tons of postcards and teacups and English flags everywhere. The locals all came by to sit and eat and catch up on all the gossip with each other. Sami read the paper and educated himself on the going prices of various dogs, horses and pygmy goats. I tried to order the Cornish pastry but they were all gone already. We ended up getting chicken and fish and chips instead. It was pretty good, but it took a while and we had actually gone to a non-fast food restaurant intending to get non-fried food. I should have ordered some tea. It would have been nice on a chilly rainy day and fitting for a British restaurant. But I forgot until we were getting ready to leave and we had a thermos in the car full of coffee anyway.

We did a couple more geocaches, a quick one at a rest area where we saw these beautiful wildflowers (Western Trillium - Trillium ovatum and Pacific Bleeding Heart - Dicentra formosa) an another on a road running parallel to the highway. In that one Sami found a duck dressed like a soldier in the cache and a garden rake just laying in the ditch. We took them both.

Finally we got to Ikea. It was really crowded and we had a hard time staying focused on what we really came to buy - the light fixtures for the home theater. We ended up buying a bunch of other stuff too. I got a shadow box frame for my leaf fossil I found when we went to the town of Fossil, Oregon and John Day Fossil beds last spring. I've been meaning to make a box for my find, but I've just been so busy I haven't even put the photos from that trip online or gotten them printed.

When we got home we watched "Notes on a Scandal". It's a different type of movie than we usually watch (action or comedy) and a little disturbing; but wow, really great acting. We completely forgot that Cate Blanchett had been the elf queen and that Judi Dench had been queen of England.