A Journal of My Adventures, Thoughts, and Occasional Cooking Projects: In Which I Travel to Seattle and What I Did There

We arrived in Seattle uncomfortably late on Friday night (11:30 pm Seattle time, which is 1:30 am Texas time). The first thing to happen after getting off the plane was my purse breaking. The bit that connects the strap to the rest of the purse is no longer capable of that role. I tied a knot. It holds. (In case Mom is reading this: This is my old purse, not the nice new one you gave me.) Not exactly an auspicious start.

I reserved a car with Budget. Fortunately my companion had the foresight to actually have the reservation confirmation number on hand. I’ll have to remember that trick for next time. I reserved a "standard 2- or 4-door" car. Budget, it should be noted was cheap this weekend. As in ~$100 less then the competition. So it was the natural choice for us. And apparently also for everyone else. We didn't get a car until at least 12:30 am, and when we got our car, it was a cute, compact Dodge Journey.

Driving an uncomfortably large vehicle in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar city with unfamiliar hills is not my favorite thing. Thanks to my excellent navigator, we made it to the hotel.

The hotel was lovely. It is all suites. It did what we needed it for. But the parking spots are so narrow, that in combination with the big car, parking was a nightly ordeal.
The hotel was almost at the end of a dead end road, which made for little traffic and a cozy ambiance. (Next to the hotel, at the end of the dead end, there is a church called (of all things) Crossroads Church.)

Saturday morning, we went to Top Pot doughnuts, which I’d heard was good, and which in reality was too sweet. Eh, well. Next we went to Pike Place market. It was cold and damp. Coming from 95+ degree days (that’s 35 C or more), the 50 degree morning (10 C) was distinctly too cold. Parking was hard, and expensive. Discovering the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) on the way, we detoured. We were going to go on Sunday, but after the trauma of parking, my companion figured we wouldn’t want to return to the area. (Ha!) The museum was nice. A good variety of media, geography, styles, time periods. Sometimes abrupt transitions, but overall very nice. We got our first taste of Chihuly, with whom the entire SeaTac area seems to be obsessed.

The market is something else. At lunch time on a holiday weekend, it was teeming with people. Teeming. There are fruit vendors and fish vendors and flower vendors and food vendors and any think else you might like to buy. Sadly, we were still full from the donuts, and off our regular schedule, so we were not hungry, so we only bought postcards. Then, we met up with some friends and headed to Boeing.

The Boeing Everett location includes the largest building in the world by volume (wikipedia).

We went inside. On a tour. This is a space large enough to have four or five 787s lined up in front of each other as they are assembled, in only one small section of the building. It is a good tour. You should take it, especially if you like airplanes. It seemed as though the tour guide was trying to sell them to us. As though we, personally, would shell out the cash for our own planes. They’re proud of what they’ve got there, and I suppose they ought to be. No pictures were allowed inside, but here are some flowers from the grounds outside:

The planes are wrapped in a special green protective coating while they are being shipped and transported, to prevent oxidation and such. The next day, we saw some plane fuselages being transported by train:

It's a plane on a train!

Apparently, while being shipped cross country, people like to take pot-shots at the plane bodies, and Boeing has a standard procedure for repairing bullet holes.

I had planned to write more, but I need to learn to write these promptly. It has taken a month to get from Seattle to blog. In brief, there were rockets and glass and salmon sashimi and kayaks and Dominion and friends, and I got better at driving.

Here are some pictures: