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| This was the view from the bench we chose, for our al fresco breakfast. Nice, huh? |
So, as I mentioned last Friday, my two daughters and I had an adventure day. We went to a small town, across the Puget Sound, called Poulsbo. Poulsbo is Norwegian in origin. It's fun, touristy, filled with all kinds of shops, galleries, restaurants, an aquarium, waterfront park often with free entertainment, nature walks on a boardwalk around Liberty Bay and some historical sights. It was a jam-packed day, and it really did feel like a vacation.
Purchased food on these trips can add up quickly, so we planned ahead and packed a cooler with snacks, beverages and lunch.
We have several individual-size thermoses. I filled mine with coffee from home, and my two daughters's thermoses with milk. These were our beverages with our breakfast. We bought pastries at the Norwegian bakery on Front Street, for our breakfast. No sense in buying coffee and milk, when I could bring some from home, and the thermoses kept everything appropriately hot or cold.
There are several nice benches that overlook the marina, at the waterfront park. We chose one in the sun, to warm us up in the chill of the early morning. This was our view from our waterfront dining location.
We left the cooler in the trunk of the car, parked in the free parking lot at the north end of town. At lunch, we went back up to the car (a short walk -- this IS a small town), and filled a daypack with the lunch items. We brought egg salad sandwiches, the second half of a can of Lay's Stax potato chips, some apple wedges, and a 1/2 gallon container of chilled water. The egg salad, I prepared the night before, but didn't make into sandwiches until the morning that we left, so the bread would not get soggy. I added watercress and lettuce from the garden to those sandwiches. The apple wedges were drizzled in a bit of lemon juice. It really doesn't take much lemon juice at all, to prevent browning on the cut apples. The potato chips were purchased earlier in the week, at Dollar Tree, for our picnic lunch at the park on Tuesday. We ate half the can then, and saved the other half for our day trip to Poulsbo. And the container of water was chilled overnight in the fridge, then packed in the cooler with ice packs in the morning. The water was perfectly chilled at lunchtime. We used a bit of the water to rinse out our thermoses from breakfast, into the bushes in the parking lot. Then each filled our thermoses with water for drinking at lunch and beyond.
Also for lunch, we purchased a large salad, to split between the 3 of us, for a fresh treat with our lunch.
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| A nice "spread" for our picnic lunch in the shade of the gazebo, but still overlooking the water. |
There's a large gazebo in the waterfront park, with a couple of picnic tables, well-sheltered from the heat of the sun. By 1 PM, it was toasty in the sun, so we found a table close to the water, but still in the shade.
While eating lunch, there was live entertainment at one end of the park. The SeaFair pirates were making a port o' call for the weekend and regaled the tourists at the park with their pirate songs.
I packed paper plates, plastic cutlery and napkins from home. I also packed plastic cups for the water, but we found it simpler to just fill our thermoses with water, and skip the cups.
We also had homemade gingerbread cookies with us, for snack time.
We had planned on dining out for dinner, but we were all still full by late afternoon. So we hit up an ice cream shop for cones for each of us, just after 6.
We spent an entire day in Poulsbo, only purchasing food items that we felt would enhance our experience -- the breakfast pastries, the salad at lunch, and the ice cream cones in the early evening. There are public drinking fountains, which we used to fill our thermoses. We took advantage of the free chilled water offered at the ice cream shop, when we got our cones. None of us really felt we missed out on anything by not buying beverages or full meals.
When members of our family take these little excursions, we find that the fun is really in the togetherness (and sometimes silliness -- see daughter in above photo), and not in eating meals in restaurants. The new-to-us atmosphere is often all we need for ambience. And who could ever argue with waterfront dining on a beautiful summer day?! Throw in a few singing pirates, and what's not to love?
