The Available Time Fairy has yet to make an appearance, precluding my writing up fantastically amusing anecdotes for your amusement. Instead, I'll give you a relatively dry bullet point presentation of the trip. Hey, I'm in project management now. This is how it's done.

• Da plane! - Had an excellent trip. All three boys behaved like angels for the entire 12 hours of travel. Lovely Wife and I kept waiting for the bomb to drop but it never arrived. It must have been using a French targeting system.
• Airport - They've got the cutest little airport in Spokane! I wanted to just put it in my pocket and take it home with me. It's an International airport because they fly to California.
• "Spokane" - They pronounce it all funny. It should be "spo-cane", right? Nope, they pronounce it "spo-can". I kept pronouncing it the right way and anytime a local looked at me like I was a tourist I told them if they want to pronounce it "spo-can" then they had to get rid of the "e" at the end.
• Driving in - Spokane looks a lot like Atlanta, scenery-wise. Lots of rolling hills and trees. The trees are all pines instead of the gorgeous mix of deciduous and coniferous we have here but it's still mighty green.
• Hotel - Not quite what we were expecting. Tiny rooms and a bit past its glory. Still, it was serviceable and it had a decent pool and spa. The area the hotel was in reminded us a lot of the East side of Buffalo, only slightly fewer crack houses since marijuana is legal.
• New family - Met the bro's wife's family our first night there. Great people with a fantastic house. It's right across the road from a park, playground and bird sanctuary type open pond thingy. Had a blast.
• The pool - Kids love water. Psychotic kids love jumping into the deep end while their parents are still at the door to the pool room. Bacon is psychotic.
• The rental - We lucked out on the rental. They didn't have a car for us in our class so they upgraded us to a Chevy Silverado 4x4 club cab for the same price. Can you say "Boo ya!"? I knew you could. As an additional bonus there's no rental car tax on trucks so it ended up actually being cheaper than if we'd gotten the car.
• Seattle - Shipped Lovely Wife off to Seattle so she could meet up with a pal. I took advantage of the estrogen free environment to indulge the boys and myself in ice cream breakfast, gadget and toy shopping and laying around the pool like a lump.
• Lowrys - Hooked up with Margi, Koolaid and The Boy™! What a great time. We hung out at the pool for a while with Margi and The Boy™ then went back to their place to pick up Koolaid. I'm happy to have finally met people with a larger menagerie than we have. I wasn't entirely sure that such a thing existed. I have serious monitor envy now - Margi is stacked! Went to dinner at a local burger joint where we had tartar sauce with our french fries. Yes, tartar sauce. I know! I thought the same thing. This was blended smooth so it ended up something like a tart dill dip and actually tasted pretty good. After that it was back to the hotel where The Boy™ watched over our hellions while the adults repaired to the penthouse bar for some conversation and adult beverages. I fell in love with Fat Tire, a particularly tasty beer. Koolaid has some freaking hillarious stories - you should go read his blog as soon as you're done reading everything I've ever written. What a great evening, definitely requiring a repeat performance some time down the road. Margi, when do y'all think you'll be in our neck of the woods?
• Sis - I got back my Big Sis. We haven't seen each other in forever (over a decade) and had sort of fallen out of contact. We picked right back up like we hadn't missed a day. Fan-fucking-tastic! To add icing to the cake, she and Lovely Wife hit it right off. She's going to come down for a visit, probably in the fall. We're also looking into a trip to the left coast. Very nice.
• Bro - Little Bro is a chef now. Come to think of it, so is Big Sis. I'm a computer nerd. How'd that happen? Anywho, Little Bro was awesome as always. He's always fun to be around because he is the seaweed in the waves. Go with the flow, there is no such thing as stress, enjoy life. Spend a day with him and you'll do better than a month of shrink visits.
• Downtown - The downtown area reminded me a lot of downtown Rochester. The stereotype of everybody in Washington drinking their body weight in coffee every day is true. There is at least one coffee shop on every block and in every store. The larger coffee shops will have another coffee shop inside them. I think it has to do with zoning laws. There were some great shops there including Boo Radleys (nick-knacks and anti-establishment paraphernalia) and Auntie's books (3 floors of new and used books with a game store, stone store, stationary store and café (remember the zoning laws) built in).
• Peoples - Everybody is thin. Even thinner than down here in Atlanta. 1200 mg of caffeine a day will do that to you. They're mostly hippies but they don't smell. Isn't that a kicker? Hippies that aren't dirty. Go figure. It's fairly easy to apply for citizenship in Washington. You just need to swear an oath against Dubya and put down a deposit on an espresso machine.
• Minorities - There are none. Seriously. I didn't see a non-white person during my entire stay. They make up for it though with a serious overabundance of suburban wiggers. They have wetbacks here too, they just call them different (Canadians).
• Dinner - The rehearsal dinner was at a place called The Onion. No connection to The Onion, as far as I know. Good food. More Fat Tires. After dinner we went back to the hotel and partied to the wee hours of the morning with Big Sis and Mom. The women in my family know how to party.
• Wedding - Simple and elegant. It was at the Universal Unitarian Universalist Unification Church of Unity. Or something like that. I just think of it as unichurch to make it easier. Or go with Little Bro's description of "clean hippie church". We don't have any of our own pictures of the wedding due to a camera mishap and double barrel brain farts on the part of Lovely Wife and I.
• Reception - Also at unichurch. Bear caught the garter. He knocked down four people to do it. He's got an excellent future as a free safety. We lost him a bit later to find him out walking the garden path with the gal who caught the bouquet. Like I said - he's got a future as a free safety. Playing for the Falcons.
• Post reception party - Back at the new in-law's house. Much merriment. Microbrew IPA on tap. Much tapping. Almost got my ass cleaned at chess by a 14 year old. Fortunately he got cocky and I was able to make corrective efforts while he was doing his pre-victory cabbage patch dance. Sukkah!
• The day after - Most of the new family went to see Episode 3. I took Mom, Lovely Wife and the boys downtown. They loved Boo Radleys but it was a trial to keep the kids in line in that store. Too many nick-knacks at little finger level. The book store worked out much better. I looked for a couple of out of print books I want and didn't find them. Then I happened upon Animalia while helping the boys find books in the kids' section. Oh. Yeah. Found The 11th Hour too. Graeme Base kicks serious ass. Incidentally, the café inside Auntie's is the only place you can buy Coke in the greater Spokane area. Lovely Wife let out tears of joy when she saw the beloved white swoosh on red.
• Da plane! Part doh - Mostly uneventful trip back. The boys were all about out of it though. A week of not enough sleep, passing out for 20 minute increments while we drove to the next place, and total shit loads of excitement put them over their limits. Even then they did pretty well. Far better than I'd expected them to act before any of the travels started.
• Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig - So we arrived home broke and exhausted. And we would have been willing to go right back out and do it again. Spokane was much fun.