Scoping out Issaquah

I must admit, the state of Washington has the neatest names for its cities! We're currently located south of Sammamish, north of Snoqualmie and east of Issaquah. Tough on elementary school kids trying to spell their address!

We drove to Issaquah to see what types of grocery stores they had and to locate the candy makers. We discovered the Fred Meyer store. Now, we were familiar with the name as we've been seeing their ads in the local newspapers, but we had yet to be in a town where one was located. So I told Denny that we had to check it out to see what type of store it was. Well, for those back in Ohio, it is a very upscale Meijers. Lots of fun stuff there, like corn cob stickers made to look like geeky old folks, colorful dinnerware, great outdoor cooking gear and patio decorations just in the outdoor section, a large sporting goods area, electronics, clothes and much,much more. Strangely enough, their grocery store section looked more like a warehouse store, which I can't quite figure out. But we spent an hour just wandering around at all the new things they've come out with that we normally ignore.

Fred Meyers and Home Depot seem to be the two big shopping anchors in town. We crossed under the highway to the main section of town and there just didn't seem to be much of a town center or business district. Perhaps more exploring is necessary, but the next trip might be back towards Redmond. Then again, if we're going to fight traffic, we may as well go to Seattle.

We located a golf course nearby, but when looking at the scorecard after we arrived back home we discovered it only has twelve holes. Hmm, why on earth stop at twelve? And which holes do you play again to get in a whole round of 18 holes without having to walk off the middle of the course? Interesting.

We saw a sign for a waterfall down the road, so that's something we'll have to check out, perhaps after our Sunday breakfast out. The skies cleared enough while we were driving for us to see that there are mountains in the distance! So if the weather turns nice I might get some good pictures next week. I imagine we'll stick close to home for the weekend; if local traffic during work hours is as bad as it was today, weekends are going to be the pits.