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Baseball continues this spring with games in the cold, in the rain and once even on a sunny day. Welcome the America's past time in the great Northwest. Today starts the playoffs for August's team. He is playing lots of first base and catcher, and is beginning to find his swing at just the right time. Today they won, but will need to face the league leader in the next round of the playoffs. The nice thing about the group of kids on the team is their support and belief in each other. It makes games very fun.

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We didn't exactly start the day off quietly. We had spotted this roller coaster at Mission Beach the first day we were in San Diego and we knew we would have to check it out before we left. The Giant Dipper may have a lame name, but it is a gem. This 83-year-old wooden roller coaster bangs you all around inside the car as you snake around on its nearly 1/2 mile track. So why not come along for our ride. Drew whipped out the Flip video camera so you can share our point of view. The Flip does not do motion very well (the DivX codec just doesn't have enough key-frames for smooth picture) but we still like the way it looks. Depending on your connection you can see the high bitrate version or the lower bitrate version on the left. In the end, the video quality is equally crappy.

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The rest of the day was pretty low key. Much needed after the animal overdose of the Zoo on day one and the Wild Animal Park on day two. We did a little shopping, explored some of the neighborhoods, swam in the hotel pool (even though it was probably on 48 degrees with at 15 mph wind) and then ended the day with great Mexican food in Old Town.  It was a great way to wrap up our brief stay in frosty San Diego. We will hit Balboa Park in the morning and jump on our flight home in the afternoon.

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The park is incredible. The kids decided it was like no "zoo" they had ever experienced before. The highlight was the tour where they had an opportunity to feed the giraffes. The weather finially cooperated with the sunny skies we expected when we booked this vacation last winter. The weather report is a return to 80 degree temperatures... the day after we leave. Oh well.

One of the tour sites pointed out that the cost of entry to the Zoo for four is actually more than a membership. Consequently, this was day two of our exercising our new-found zoo member status. Lots of free stuff besides admission. So lots of new photos from the day, most of them snapped by Kat. She is becoming quite the shooter.

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We made it in to San Diego late last night. The hotel is on the beach, but the weather sure does not feel like Southern California.Upper 50's feels more like January than April.

Today was a journey to the San Diego Zoo, a first for all of us. Dang that is one big zoo. We had a great time, with the pandas and the meerkats as favorites. Afterwords it was dinner on the Embarcadero. 

We are a bit trashed so it is a quite night after a quick frigid swim at the hotel pool. Lots of photos from the day in the picture section.

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Kat, Kyra, August & Naveed have been participating in the production of the PBS series "BizKid$". One Saturday in November they gathered in a Seattle high school classroom with a few other kids to shoot the next few installments of a reoccurring segment called Substitute Teacher. They have appeared in six of the first 13 episodes. This is Kat's behind the scenes perspective of taping a network television show.

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Since the purpose of this site was to document the adventures of the kids, we have moved all the house stuff to a new blog.

 http://mokels.vox.com/ 

The address above is where you can watch the progress of our little house as it grows. We will keep the focus of this site on the adventures of Kat, Kyra, August and Naveed.

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StarFerry

August takes a trip across Victoria harbor on the Star Ferry. He gives us an inside look at his favorite place to sit and why he thinks it is the best bargain in Hong Kong. Click here for his report.

The fleet of twelve ferries operates four routes across the harbor, carrying over 70,000 passengers a day, or 26 million a year. Even though there are now other ways to cross the harbour (by MTR Subway and road tunnels), the Star Ferry continues to provide an efficient, popular and inexpensive mode of crossing from point A to point B. The company's main route runs between Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, which is what most people mean by "the Star Ferry". This route has become one of the icons of Hong Kong heritage in the eyes of tourists. From the ferry, one can take in the famous view of the harbour and the Hong Kong skyline.

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HongKongFood

Naveed files a report on three types of food we have encountered in Hong Kong. He describes a vegetarian offering from the Po Lin Monastery, the growth of fast food and our family favorite on the trip, Dim Sum.

Click here for this tasty story on some tasty Hong Kong eats.

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Hong Kong History

Kat presents her insights on a little of the history of Hong Kong. With locations covering Kowloon to Lantau Island to the heart of Hong Kong, Kat helps us to understand the conflict of the Opium wars and the ancient tradition of foot binding. She puts it all in her own perspective.

You can click here for the full size version of her report, and like always, if you are on a slower connection it is best to click play, pause it for 5-10 seconds so the file download can get a head start, and then click play. It should play smoother using the play-pause-play strategy.

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The kids are in bed and the van comes to pick us up at 7am. It has been a whirlwind of a trip, and we don't think any of us will be the same. The kids are now world travelers and foreign correspondents (that is once we can get home to post the reports they shot.) We had an amazing time. Thank you for all of your kind notes and great feedback. We are sorry the technical stuff got in our way, but next time we will have a better idea on how to streamline the operation.

The journey home should not be as grueling if for no other reason than we will be flying in the dark from Tokyo to Seattle. A much better recipe for getting these guys some much needed shut eye. We hope to get the last of our stuff up here by Monday night, so please check back. The guys all worked really hard on their stories and Darcy & Drew are sure they would love to know that you saw them and enjoyed them; Dad just needs to get his behind in gear and get them up on the web.

Friday was dim sum for luch (we all agreed the finest we had ever experienced) and an activity we dubbed "The international day of shopping." And of course we ended the day with Chinese food. You know, they do a pretty good job of ccoking it over here. We were shocked, shocked the learn how they had mastered that cooking thing.

Happy trails, we'll keep you posted on our progress.

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