Two Field Trips

As the school year was winding down, I was able to spend two Fridays on field trips with the middle and high school students.  For our first field trip, we went to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. I've been wanting to go for years, but have never made the trip.  They recently moved to a new building on Lake Union.  Going places on a field trip is often much more affordable and this was no exception.  Adults got in free and I paid $6 for the kids instead of paying $14 for me and $12 for the children.  The visit to MOHAI wasn't until the afternoon, so we started off by visiting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor's Center.

Making a public service announcement.

The Foundation Visitor's Center was a computer heavy, interactive area where we learned about some of the main missions of the foundation, including: education, vaccinations and clean water.  We were able to learn about current efforts, give our own suggestions for things that would work, and draft public service announcements for the different missions.  It was free to visit and kept us happily occupied for an hour.

We ate lunch in the grassy area surrounding MOHAI.  Elizabeth wanted a treat from this food cart.  They weren't very efficient.  She was third in line and it took her 25 minutes to get to the front of the line so she could get her Italian Soda!

 The museum is set up so you wind your way through, beginning with Native American history and learning about the development of Washington state, with an emphasis on the Seattle area.  The exhibits were quite interesting.  One thing I learned is that there were a lot of cliffs and steep hills in Seattle at the turn of the century so they used water cannons to spray down the cliffs, leveling them out.  The land around Seattle is so changed now, the original topographic map looks like a different place entirely.

Artifacts celebrating Washington becoming a state.

Dode isn't the first to build a backyard rocket!

View from the 3rd floor of the museum.

Isaac got bored and decided to take a nap.  He's laying on the couch in the overview photo above near the top left of the photo.

This sat in Seattle for years at the intersection you use to go to the Seattle Center.  As a child, it was always my landmark letting me know we were getting close to our destination.

I also learned about all the things I take for granted that were invented in the Seattle area.  UPS, Costco, ultrasound machines, disposable diapers, and Medic One which brought CPR into homes when firemen responded to 911 calls followed by CPR being taught to lay people.

"The Seattle paramedic program did more than pioneer paramedics and promote the tiered response system. It was the first program in the world to make citizens part of the emergency system. Cobb knew from data the program had collected that the sooner CPR was started, the better the chances of survival. He reasoned that the best way to ensure early initiation of CPR was to train the bystanders. Thus Cobb, with the support of Vickery, began a program in 1972 called Medic 2. Its goal was to train over 100,000 people in Seattle how to do CPR. Cobb recalled how the idea was first proposed:

One day he [Vickery] said, "Look, if it's so important to get CPR started quickly and if firemen come around to do it, it can't be that complicated that other folks couldn't also learn—firemen are not created by God to do CPR. You could train the public." I said, "That sounds like a very good idea." Shortly afterwards things started.

Cobb decided to use an abbreviated course of training. "We weren't going to do it by traditional ways where they had to come for 20 hours (of training). So they had to do it at one sitting—how long will people participate?—well, maybe three hours and that's pretty much the way it was.” Cobb cautiously did not state how long it would take to train 100,000 people. He had no idea. In fact it took only a few years and by the 20th anniversary of the citizen training program over half a million people in Seattle and the surrounding suburbs had received training in CPR."

Two weeks later, we went back to Seattle to take the Underground Seattle tour.  I've been on it before but the children hadn't.  You can never know how long traffic will delay your drive to Seattle in the morning so I allowed lots of extra time.  We ended up getting there an hour early.  After I spent a bit of time driving around looking for parking that wouldn't cost me $20 (yikes!) we still had an hour until the tour.  

We saw a directional sign that the Seattle library was down the street so we headed off.  It ended up being about 10 blocks.  Elizabeth is a slow walker and we often missed the "walk" signal at intersections because she was lagging behind.  Lagging behind until we got to the block the library was on, then she started power walking!  Our whole family (well except Dode and William) are library nerds, we love them!  Even though they couldn't check out books, the children loved exploring the library.  It's quite an interesting building.  The library has 11 levels spread through 362,987 square feet.  They have one million books in their collection, in 9,906 shelves.  One thing the kids thought was amazing was the over 400 computers available for public use (the Arlington library has 8!)  One thing that I was worried about was keeping track of the children as they set off exploring the different areas in the library.  Thankfully, we were all able to reunite each time we got separated.

The Red Hall.  William's favorite color is red and he'd be in heaven hanging out here.

The glass used on the library would cover 5 1/2 football fields!

Elizabeth saw this piece of art and asked me what they were.  I tried to explain card catalogs to her but they just didn't make sense to someone who's grown up with a computer.

It's a bit of a scary feeling to look down several floors to the "living room".

View from the highest point in the library.

You can get from floor to floor by: elevator, stairs, escalators and a "book spiral" (ramps).

After the excitement of the library, the underground tour might have been a bit of a disappointment (weird children I know!).  In case you are unfamiliar with the history, here's a brief overview as I understand it.  Downtown Seattle was originally build on tidal flats that were raised up with the use of unstable fill.  Remember the water cannons we learned about at MOHAI for leveling cliffs?  The dirt they sluiced down and abundant sawdust from sawmills were placed in the tidal flats with the buildings and streets built on top of them.  The problem was that during unusually high tides, the streets would flood.  Their primitive sanitation (pit toilets or raw sewage draining into the Puget Sound) would wash all over the streets when the tides came in.  A fire in 1889 basically leveled the downtown.  

The city managers decided the new streets would be one-to-two stories higher than the original streets to prevent flooding and to allow a sewer system to be developed.  Buildings were being erected the same time as the streets so for a while, people were accessing the buildings on the bottom floor, which would become a basement once the streets were finished.  It was up to the merchants to purchase sidewalks so for a while, the sidewalks were at ground level with streets towering above them.  People would climb up and down ladders to cross the streets.  As the merchants had the funds, street level sidewalks were added, leaving the original sidewalks below.  People could decide if they wanted to walk on the original sidewalks (avoiding the rain) or the street level sidewalks.  This was the Seattle Underground.  

People were able to use both sidewalks until 1907, when the city condemned the underground due to fears about plague carrying rats.  For many years, the only people using the underground were those who prefer their activities go unnoticed, bootleggers, thiefs, opium dens.  Over time, about 50% of the building owners incorporated the old underground sidewalks into their storage areas while the other 50% was left unused.  When you take the underground tour, you are able to walk some of these unused sidewalks.  The best part of the tour for me is not walking the sidewalks, it is hearing the stories of how they came to be.

We stopped at Cow Chip Cookies for this "bull" sized cow chip.  We split it four ways!

After our tour, we walked over to the Klondike Gold Rush National Park.  You might wonder why Seattle would have a Klondike National Park.  The City of Seattle hired a newspaper man by the name of Erastus Brainerd to be their PR man.  He coined the phrase, "Seattle, Gateway to the Klondike" and spread his message far and wide, throughout the nation and the world.  Of the 100,000 prospector who went to the Klondike, 70,000 of them made it their by way of Seattle.   So, while all those prospectors were seeking gold, Seattle was accumulating it in the form of catering to all those prospectors. The gold rush was quite a boon to Seattle, not for the gold the prospectors brought back with them, but the gold they spent getting to the gold fields.  The museum was interactive, informative, and FREE!  I don't know if the children enjoyed it as much as me, but I'm pretty accustomed to that!

Waling back to the car, we stumbled on this oasis in the middle of the city.

The waterfall was great and drowned out all the street noise.  I wish we'd chosen to eat our lunch here instead of the homeless haven of Occidental Park!