Seattle - Friday and Saturday

The flight to Seattle was uneventful, and I got some good views of the world on the way. It was kind of cool to be flying over some glaciated mountains, and then suddenly this hummocky area. I couldn't see the volcano itself, but I knew from my old topographic map studies that Mt. Shasta was on the other side of the plane. And the flight was relatively quiet. It turned out there was a baby behind me the whole flight, but it never made a noise until we were on our descent.

Dian picked me up and we went back to her place and set up my palatial air mattress. It was my choice to stay with her because it just seemed like it would be easier than doing the hotel shuffle and coordination. Then we just chatted about things until after 11:00.

The next morning we started the day with breakfast (egg and sausage quesadilla for me), and then the walking began.

We continued downhill to the Olympic Sculpture Park. Wake was the most impressive, and I probably should have taken pictures, but there just wasn't a good way to get the impression of them in a picture. Their scale is such that it wouldn't carry over.

Then we looped around and walked through the Seattle Center. I didn't take a lot of pictures over the trip just because I didn't want all the typical touristy pix. I saw the Space Needle (whee.), and the remnants of the 1962 World's Fair.

Then we went to the NFFTY animation show. It was pretty cool with a couple good entries including an hour long LEGO animation. Not really a short with that length, but still pretty impressive. It took the kid who did it three years to make (20 minutes each year).

Then we walked downtown.

We followed the monorail (with the Simpsons song in my head) until it ended, we passed by Pike Place Market (we'd come back to it), and went on to Pioneer Square, and past that to a big bookstore. The cafe below ground at the bookstore is the one that they used as a model for the TV show Frasier. And on the way we passed the Seattle Utilikilt store. We were kind of... moving with purpose, so I got a promise that we'd come back later in the weekend. We backtracked to Pike Place Market, and wandered through that seeing the original Starbuck's store.

Then time was pressing, and we walked back to Dian's apartment to get cleaned up for dinner and Gutenberg! The Musical!...

The walk turns out to be over 7 miles, and is probably closer to 8. With lots of hills. And that was just a warm up for Sunday.