Let me just say that Melinda and I like oysters. I mean we really like oysters. So this morning I conducted a little Internet search and came up with this result for 8 Seattle-based oyster bars. Number 8 on the list is a place called The Walrus & the Carpenter, a restaurant Melinda has long wanted to visit. And with half price oysters from 4-5pm, away we went!

We ordered two dozen oysters, a king’s amount, a dozen for each of us, 4 of each of the 6 varieties they had. We ordered two glasses of Muscadet, a white wine from the Loire Valley in France, not far from Nantes, the city in which we lived for 13 months with our daughters in 2010/11. While waiting for the oysters, we sipped our wine and ate one of the best salads I’ve ever tasted, a grapefruit salad with fresh crab…

We also came up with the idea of visiting 5 restaurant happy hours in Seattle, one each day this week. This will make our spring break special and unique. It didn’t hurt that today in Seattle it was nearly 70 degrees.

The oysters were incredible, all 24 of them. We topped them off by sharing a cocktail called “I’m Your Huckleberry” that has huckleberry juice and a French liqueur called Avèze (gin and lime juice, too) that we had never heard of. Melinda referred to it as her “medicine,” so taken by it was she. On our way to a nearby Redbox site to pick up “American Hustle,” our entertainment for the night, we picked up a bottle of Avèze and are right now watching the movie and sipping an Avèze cocktail.

That’s spring break, day one.