Good ol’ Washington state

After traveling for 7.5 months, we went home to be with our friends and family for Thanksgiving. We love the Thanksgiving, so we made sure we were home for at least one of the holidays. We planned out our 2 weeks there so that we can spend it with both sides of the family equally and with our friends.

Most of our time was spent at our family’s houses enjoying delicious homemade food (oh how we’ve missed it!), meeting up with friends, shopping for new travel clothes, and celebrating Thanksgiving with big fat turkeys! A lot of our friends are expecting babies, so it was so good to see them and their growing bumps. We’d stay up late with them catching up on what we’ve missed in each other’s lives. Some bought land to build a house, some are remodeling, and some just adopted a cat.

Since both of our families live so far outside of the Seattle/ Bellevue area we decided it would best to stay in the middle to make things easier. We loved how both of the cities were dressed up for the Holidays, which made the stay a little extra special!

For a few nights we stayed in Kirkland at the Woodmark Hotel. The hotel sits right on Lake Washington which makes for stunning views. They have a restaurant called Bin on the Lake that we enjoyed with our friends. It has sweeping view of Lake WA and serves locally sourced ingredients which we always love! The downtown Kirkland area is a must visit when in Washington. There are lots of shops, restaurants, and cafes that line the streets. We love this city and are considering living here when we move back to WA.

Another great area to go to during the holiday season is Bellevue. Every night in the month at December, Bellevue Way turns into Snowflake Lane. It has become a tradition of ours to come out here and get into the Christmas spirit. We stayed at the Westin Bellevue to be close to the shopping, Snowflake Lane, and meeting up with friends. The hotel is across the street from the mall as well as a bunch of delicious restaurants.

We used to live 10 minutes from this area and have been to most of the restaurants here except for Cypress! We went there on a Friday night because they have jazz night and boy was that fun! The food was incredibly delicious, and the jazz singers were top notch!