Tires and Toys

About 10 days ago, Andrew hit a pot hole and the side rim of our tire blew out.  He got on the spare and we started shopping for tires.  We found out that Costco tires were the cheapest in the area by about $200 but when we went to go order them, their system was down.  $200 was a big enough difference for us to wait it out, until we remembered how close we live to the border now.  We price checked down there and the same tires were $200 cheaper than Coscto’s.  Of course then it snowed. So I had a coupe sketchy days driving to work with three bald tires and a spare.   This morning we checked and our tires had arrived, so we headed down to Blaine. We could really only go to Border Tire because of the spare.  We didn’t want to be the jerks driving 45m/h on the freeway just to save another couple bucks.  We ended up getting better tires than we had planned, for $130 less than the cheapest set at Costco, after taxes and installation costs.  Pretty good deal and totally worth the trip over the border. 

So once we were over the border, we figured we could make a day of it.  We thought we might go to the Children’s Museum in Seattle, but had to stop for lunch first.  Sacha doesn’t do well if he is hungry.  We found a Red Robin at Northgate Mall and around the corner, a Toys R Us was having a closing sale, everything was 80% off.  It had been pretty picked clean, but we picked up a kids MP3 player, a digital camera toy in the shape of Buzz Lightyear’s Phaser, some Green Army Man toys and a clock radio in the shape of a wienerdog, all for $25.  Not too shabby.  Of course, we had some tears when I wouldn’t buy a game that Sacha desperately wanted.  But it was large and was some kind of hunting game, which we don’t have room for and I just don’t want in my house.

After the long drive, lunch and the craziness of a great sale in a toy store, both Sacha and Alice were not in the head space to go to a museum.  And we were not in the mood to wrangle them.  They have both been sick all week.  So it was kind of a long driving day for not too much reward but still fun.  Both kids were asleep in the car 5 minutes after we got back on the highway.