Pacific Northwest Summer Bucket List for 2018

If you live in Seattle or anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest for that matter, what do you do in summer when the kids get out of school?  Do you plan for big vacations?  Do you stick around town?  We usually tend to stay in Seattle in the summer and we like to make a bucket list so that the days don’t fly by-we want to savor ALL OF THEM!  This year we scratched out our bucket list on a napkin over a quick dinner before we scurried up to the mountains so we could spend the first days of summer floating in one of our favorite local lakes.  As usual, we’re hoping for a lot of sunshine and local fun!  Here’s our Northwest Summer Bucket List for 2018:

PACIFIC NORTHWEST SUMMER BUCKET LIST FOR 2018

1.) Visit Flaming Geyser State Park.  We’ve heard rumors of a geyser in Washington State and we’ve been meaning to visit forever.  This is definitely one place we’ll be heading to this summer!

2) Visit 20 local parks.  We have a family debate going on whether or not it counts enough if we go to the same park 20 times but that seems a little weak for us.  We’re 5 days into summer and we’ve been to the same park 5 times…..a few years ago we had the goal of fifty parks, so maybe if we do 20 different parks, we’ll actually meet our goal.  It’s also hard to decide what actually makes a park, and for us a park is still only a park if it actually has a playground.

3) Finally go to Great Wolf Lodge. It’s on our calendar, and the guys are so excited to check it out.  If you’ve been there and have a blog post, please link it below-I’d love to hear about it!

4) Support our baseball team.  The boys are so into cheering on the Seattle Mariners this year.  They want to go to ALL the games this summer and I’m really excited that they have a family game on July 22nd.

5) Check out Funko in Everett.  Rumor has it this place is amazing to visit.  Have you been? We need to organize a day there ASAP.

6) Read 5 books.  This is a bigger goal for me than the kids.  They go through books like water.  I have a list of books for 9 and 10 year old boys in my Amazon shop that might help if you’re looking for books for this age group too.  We spend so much on books that we’ve decided to pay the kids $2 for every book they read from the library so that we can save a bit of money and save shelf space in the house.  The University Bookstore also has a great summer reading book program for kids and I’ve picked up the SAL Grownup Summer Book Bingo so I have incentive to read too.

7) We are headed to Vernon this summer.  We totally want to ride the Kraken which is a stand up paddle board for 6-10 riders.  Have you heard of a stand up paddle board this big?

8) We are also going car camping.  The boys really want to hike and camp but we haven’t camped in forever so this is a start.  We have a booking up in British Columbia with friends and we’re so excited to see the area.

9) Making ice cream and pizza is on our list ever since we went to Italy.  I have to find our ice cream maker and I’m so excited to cook with my kids!  There is a new culinary school for kids in Seattle called Frogslegs that we’re looking forward to visiting too.

10) The guys never really got into making slime but maybe this is the summer we will.  They have put “science experiments” on this bucket list, so I’m not sure where that will bring us, but hopefully it’s not super messy.  I still count cooking as science so maybe making pizza and ice cream might count as science experiments too.

11) Change rooms.  Stay tuned for TONS of  home improvement projects this summer.  We’re all rearranging our rooms this summer and the guys are finally splitting up into their own rooms!

12) Painting the house.  Not the outside but the inside.  This goes with the bucket list item above.  I have no idea how to paint but this summer we’re going to figure it out.  Any suggestions would be totally welcome!

13) The guys are making a growth chart for our Venus Fly Trap.  It has been alive since last summer so that is a win in itself.  This year they want to create something to track it’s growth.  They are so much more optimistic about their gardening skills than I am.

14) Alaska or California?  We have one weekend where we’ve decided to take a short airplane trip and we’re still debating WHERE to go from Seattle.  We don’t want to spend a lot of time in transit so if you’ve been to either of these places and have a suggestion on where we should go, I’d love to hear!

15) Stay up for the fireworks on the 4th.  Usually we either leave town because our guys are not fireworks fans but this year is a big year for them so they have decided they will watch.  We now need to figure out where to watch the fireworks in Seattle for the 4th.

16) Turn 10 years old!  Our guys are turning 10 this year.  I can’t believe I’ve been a parent for a decade!

17)The guys need to take a swimming test with all their clothes on. It’s for a boating camp and I didn’t realize how intense this test would be.

18) Visit the new Space Needle.

19) Try an Adventure Ropes Course and we’ve heard there might be one in Tacoma or Bellevue that we should visit. These have been popping up everywhere and we totally want to visit one.

20) Agate hunting in Ellensburg.  There is some kind of rare agate you can find only in Ellensburg that I read about somewhere and casually mentioned to my mother.  She has decided we have to find these agates.  It has become a mission.

21) Visit Vancouver Island.  We love hanging out on the water in the summer and taking a ferry to the island is one of our favorite ways to go.  Last year we used the Victoria Clipper for the first time and we had a blast!

We might add to this list a little over the next few days but for now, this is what we are thinking about doing this summer and we’re about 5 days in.  Have you started summer yet?  Do you make a bucket list?  And if you’re also a Seattle family, do you have any more ideas for what we can do in the area for the summer?

Terumi

Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys.  She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live.  She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)