Chraela,  Food,  In My Life,  Seattle/Disneyland - April 2016,  Travel

Seattle/Disneyland Trip – Day 2

This is the second post in a series about our trip to Seattle and Disneyland in April 2016. All the posts about our trip will be listed here! This is Day 2, Day 1 is here.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

After such an exciting first day, surely we would be taking it easy on day 2, right? WRONG!! Our first planned activity of the day was a HIKE!! We even had a little picnic and everything!

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When planning this vacation, I wanted to make sure that we did activities that both Chris and I would enjoy. Chris really likes the outdoors and nature, and I really like culture and big cities. I tried to get a mix of things we would both like to do, and my sister had mentioned that there were tons of beautiful hiking trails in Seattle, so I threw one on the itinerary. We ultimately decided on the Coal Creek Trail. It didn’t seem to be too difficult or long, and we had fun dinner plans so we wanted to work up an appetite anyway.

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It actually ended up being much more difficult than we anticipated lol… It wouldn’t have been bad but there were a LOT of steep hills. Even my siblings, who go out on trails like this a lot, were tired by the end of it. And I don’t know if you’ve gathered this about me…but I am not a naturey person…..so this was a bit much for me. But we made our way through it and still had a good time! The views were amazing AND we saw lots of cute dogs.  I’ll let my sister’s photos speak for themselves (this is me advertising her website again hehehehe)

Chris took another sneaky pic of me:

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And my favorite part about the hike – further proof of Seattle being dog-friendly:

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After we were sufficiently worn out from that, we headed home to (finally!) relax a little bit before dinner. aka hang out with my sister’s cats:

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As I said before, we had fun dinner plans that night. While we were there Seattle was having their Restaurant Week. If you live near a big city, you’ve probably heard of something similar – basically for this week a bunch of area restaurants offer a 3 course meal for one flat price. It’s a cool way to try fancy places without spending fancy money. We chose The Olive and Grape, a Mediterranean/Greek restaurant – when Chris saw that there was baklava on the menu we knew it was the winner.

The restaurant was super cute! It was partially indoors but it also opened out so you could see onto the street. A look at the menu they had for Restaurant Week (click for larger):

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And then an ambient wine menu photo:

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Delicious! We had looked over the menu before so we all kinda had an idea of what we wanted. Here’s our appetizers:

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My sister got the Turkish Platter: Dolmades (grape leaves with rice and spices), Börek (filo stuffed with feta and parsley) and Tzatziki with pita bread. Chris and I both ordered Polpettini: mini meatballs with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese. My brother got Grilled Shrimp: marinated in Mediterranean spices with a lemon garlic dressing. We all sampled each others’ and really enjoyed all of them – those filo pastries were so good! I told Chris it was not good for blogability for us to order the same thing but he did not listen lol

Our main dishes:

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My sister got the Seafood Duo: grilled Mediterranean-style salmon served with grilled shrimp skewers and asparagus. My brother got the Lamb Shank: braised and simmered in rosemary au jus and served with potato puree. Chris got Smoked Salmon Ravioli: homemade ravioli served in a rose-vodka sauce. and I got the Tavuk Tava Chicken: marinated chicken breasts with mushrooms and peppers and topped with cheese. All of these were a hit, but the standouts for me were the lamb and the chicken. I was OBSESSED with my chicken. It was juicy and moist and soooo delicious. The pitas served with it were great for soaking up the extra sauce. The lamb was also so good, really tender and great with the side of mashed potatoes.

Finally, it was time for dessert. We had basically agreed that two of us would get the tiramisu and two would get the baklava, and we could all split them. But then…tragedy struck. The server came over and let us know that they were OUT OF BAKLAVA!!!!! This was devastating considering we had specificially chosen this restaurant due to the baklava as a dessert option. Okay, we weren’t actually upset because the meal was so good, but it was a bit disappointing.

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Instead, my sister opted to get the Strawberry Panna Cotta and the rest of us all got Nonna’s Tiramisu. The panna cotta was fine, I’m not a huge fan of fruit desserts though. The tiramisu was actually awesome. It wasn’t baklava, but all of us were really happy with it anyway!

At the end of the meal we were stuffed. I’m really glad we got to go during Restaurant Week, it was so much fun! After the meal we headed home to relax and watch the week’s episode of Survivor (hey, even on vacation we have to keep up and avoid spoilers). We were tired from the long day and headed to bed for more fun adventures the next!!

That’s day 2 in Seattle! Tomorrow we look forward to being uber tourists at Pike Place Market and the first Starbucks 😀

til next time! xo, kaela

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