The 20th annual West Seattle Thriftway Easter Egg Hunt saw well over 500 children, parents, grandparents and one very large rabbit show up to look for eggs in places obvious and not so obvious throughout the store on Saturday April 23.

Starting promptly at 9:00 am the first in were the toddlers who were given a couple of minutes to find and collect (up to the 35 limit) plastic eggs. There were 25,000 distributed throughout the store. "A lot of them got recycled from last year," said Paul Kapioski, store owner, " and because Easter and Earth Day are together this year we're handing out recycled bags too."

The top prize was a Nintendo Wii computer game and Kapioski added, "there's candy, toys and 110 prizes from the Wii to Barbie dolls, and Mariner tickets."

While the official designation is 20 years of egg hunts, it actually goes back farther. "We did it back before it was a Thriftway," said Kapioski," when it was a Tradewell, so actually at least 25 years."

"One of our employees here mentioned that she and her sister used to come as kids," Kapioski said.

Sue Lindblom was there with her 7 1/2 year old grandson, for the first time. "He's really pumped," she said, "I got to his house this morning and the first thing he said to me was,'That was a short night.' He was busy last night dyeing eggs. We dyed about 11 dozen eggs. It's inexpensive entertainment."

On hand for the event were vendors Vashon Coffee Company and Middle Fork Roasters providing coffee for the crowd.