Property
I was very excited when the Woodmark Hotel contacted me to invite me and my family to come stay at the hotel and try out their Family Ties: Escape To The Lake family package.  As a Seattle local, I’d been to the hotel a number of times but I hadn’t yet had the chance to stay at this elegant, luxury property.

The Woodmark is a favorite wedding spot situated as it is on Lake Washington with stunning sunset views of the lake, Seattle and the Olympic Mountains. With a number of well-recommended restaurants in and around the hotel on Carillon Point, it’s also a favorite location for business meetings. Given this, I had never really considered the hotel as a destination for a family break and I have to say that it was with some trepidation that I edged across the SR-520 on a hot Friday evening with my energetic kids in tow.

Location
The Woodmark is located just off Lake Washington Drive in Kirkland, Washington. It’s about a 20-minute walk from the hotel to downtown Kirkland.

Sleeps
There are two rooms offered for the Escape To The Lake package: a 2-queen guest room and a suite. The 2-queen room is very generously sized with a spacious bathroom and a foyer-style space with tea and coffee-making facilities and a small fridge. The suite is huge. (It may even be bigger than our first apartment in Washington). The master bedroom and bathroom are capacious and the living room area is furnished with 4-person dining room table, a desk and a queen-sized pull-out sofa – not to mention an additional armchair, side tables and a coffee table. There’s also a powder room so that if your children need to go to the bathroom during night, they don’t need to wake you up to do so.

Highlights
We started our evening with a private tour of Lake Washington aboard the Woodmark II, a 1956 Chris-Craft yacht with Captain Rob. It was the perfect start to our weekend. Initially, the kids relaxed below-decks while my husband and I enjoyed the cooling breeze and Rob’s explanations of the geography of the area. In time, our exclamations at some of the wackier garden décor in the (very large, very well appointed) properties on the lakeshore caught our children’s attention. They came up just in time to see a full-size Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton artfully placed in the large rotunda of a lakeside mansion.

Dinner at the Beach Café was relaxed, casual and entertaining. Kudos go to Kenny, our waiter, for drawing our (by then tired and grumpy) children into conversation by talking about his love of video games. They couldn’t get enough of him. The free in-room movies (also included in the package) meant that Mom and Dad had some quality parent-time enjoying the views from our balcony while our boys watched a movie before bed.

The hotel staff really made my family feel welcome during our stay. The location, on the lake and away from the hustle and bustle of the downtown areas in Seattle and Bellevue meant that the area has a resort feel – so much so that one point during the weekend my younger son exclaimed “this really feels like another country”.

Good to know
There’s no real beach at Carillon Point, but if you walk North from there towards downtown Kirkland, you’ll pass no less than three beach parks. The first, Houghton Beach Park is the largest with a playground and a beach volleyball court. Agua Verde Café has a little café and also rents kayaks on-site. Beware though, there’s very little shade in this park. If you’re with very young children, it may be best to continue to the smaller Marsh or David E. Brink parks. All parks have plenty of grassy space to lay out a picnic blanket, some picnic tables and a public dock for diving and swimming.

Contact
www.thewoodmark.com

Written by Michelle Duffy

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