Day 9: Death to Garmina!!

Rita and Bud named their GPS device Garmina. It’s made by a company called Garmin. I know, it’s not very creative, but it sounds good. We’ll get back to Garmina, later, but first, let me update you on our day.

After a nice fresh fruit (from Pike Place Market in Seattle) and cereal breakfast, we checked out of Mounthaven around 11 o’clock. On the way back to Seattle to catch the ferry, we decided to stop in Enumclaw, Washington, to visit the memorial erected there to honor the victims of the airplane crash in 1946. The memorial is a nice plaque inset into a large rock, and Boyd’s brother’s name is the last one on the last, Duane White, from Ottawa, Kansas. The memorial is kept in a pretty veterans’ memorial park. After reflecting on the sacrifice of these 32 young men (28 of the men were Marine privates), we ate lunch at a nice public park in Enumclaw and then got back on the road, with our next stop coming in Puyallup at the Wal-Mart to pick up some medicine and some other travel essentials, i.e. candy for Tracy and Jeremy.

From Puyallup we headed back to the Emerald City. Traffic wasn’t as bad as we thought, and we pulled into the ferry line-up about 5:15 for the 5:30 ferry. The ferry ride was really smooth and windy, and it only took about 35 minutes. We disembarked from the boat and got on the highway for Suquamish and the resort. After a fairly short drive, we arrived at the hotel around 7. We got our hotel rooms set up (Carrie and I, Tracy and Jeremy, and Bud and Rita in the Chief Sealth (more about him in a later post) suite), and headed out to pick up dinner. Here’s where Garmina comes into the story.

Around 9 o’clock, Carrie, me, Jeremy, and Tracy programmed the local A&W into the Garmin, and set off on our way. About 10 miles and 15 minutes later, we ended up at the Treehouse Café, which Rita and checked into earlier but was already closed. We are all positive that I programmed the A&W into the GPS, but for some reason it led us in the opposite direction. After stopping at the Treehouse to regroup and find the street address for the A&W, we took off. After another 15 to 20 minutes to get to A&W, we get there to discover that it’s located inside a freakin’ gas station and it’s closed!! We then decided to just go to a Burger King and get it over with. We finally got back to our hotel rooms and started eating at about 10:30. Needless to say, a frustrating end to the day, but nothing the BDC can’t handle. This did give us a new name for the Garmin: Lucifina Garmina. But this should be a lesson to everyone: don’t rely on GPS devices to get you where you are going. Nothing beats a good map and a little brainpower. Should be a pretty quiet day for us tomorrow as we get to hang around Suquamish.

Check out Day 9 photos...

Day 9

-BDC