Yesterday, we headed out to Ballard to the
Nordic Heritage Museum to see
The Vikings Begin exhibit, and also to see the viking reenactors for their special "Vikings in the Gallery" event. There was a ton of good stuff to see!
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| This is a reproduction of one of the helmets in the exhibit -- pretty cool because you could actually touch it! |
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| A little traveling scale with weights |
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| This is something I hadn't seen before in the context of vikings -- silk embroidered with silver. This fabric would have originally been a bright red. |
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| The helmet that the above reproduction is based on. There's a good portion of the helmet that's been worn away, but what makes that cool is you can see the construction -- there's a frame structure that's been covered with a roughly woven fabric, and then over that covered with leather and metal. |
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| Visiting the BIG boat. |
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| The boys had a good time with the reproduction scale out in the hallway. |
After our time at the museum, we headed out to walk around Ballard; we've spent relatively little time in Seattle since we moved up here, so we thought it'd be fun just to walk around and see what there was to see. You know what we found? An arcade! That's also an
ice cream shop (it also has beer, but we didn't try any of that). This is a good,
good combo.
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| We tried the huckleberry chip, cherry almond chip, salted caramel and the maple walnut flavors. While they were all good, the salted caramel and the huckleberry chip were the best. |
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| This place had pretty much perfect arcade atmosphere -- slightly grungy, kinda cramped, a bit loud, some weird art on the walls, and the lady at the front had blue hair and sparkly platform boots. We've been to a few arcades in the area, but haven't been very happy with the mix of games; this location had a bunch of pinball machines, but also fighting games, racing, etc. Also a Pac-Man table, which Oz and I played several rounds of. |
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| When you play multiplayer Pac-Man, you can also eat the other Pac-Mans... I kept getting the title for this, though Oz was the one winning the most rounds overall. |
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| Saffron playing Crazy Taxi -- she spent a lot of time reversing through the city streets, which was hilarious as the game has no way to look behind you while you do this. Many things were run over. |
Needless to say, my kids are already begging us to go back.
