Seattle

Drinking in Seattle on a Sunday...what heathens we are! 

The next morning, we blitzed North. Kim was on overdrive and powered through town after town, making up for lost time, jacked up on Arizona Sweet Tea. We ended up in Portland, where we spent only 6 hours, 5 3/4 of which were asleep. Portland is certainly a lovely town, but we saw none of it. Actually, that's not entirely accurate; we were able to assess the quality of thier flyovers and highway bridges, both of which were as thrilling as any flyover of highbridge could be expected to be. We were blitzing because we wanted to get to Seattle, a major stop on our desired trip. Seattle has a unique allure as a city, perched in the Pacific Northwest. It's also where Phil lives, one of my good mates from Purdue. He'd moved out there to go work at Boeing just weeks before. After a hilarious navigation of busy highways into town, some creative Kimberly navigation and dubious parking, we met up with Phil and, as typical with Phil, a entourage of ladies. As typical with Seattlites at the weekend, he was found in a gastropub, flavoursome beer in hand. This is a life I could appreciate. We enjoyed an afternoon wandering the shore of Lake Union...

Phil and a new friend

We went back to Phil's swanky new apartment where we were to base for the next couple nights. Lovely place he has himself up in Everett, right near the Boeing plant. Kinda makes me want to be in engineering... wait...

The next morning, we went to the local place to be: Boeing. They have a huge plant there in Everett that we did the tour of. Good fun. Great to see those aircraft put together. It's surprising how fast they do it; mere days to build a craft, with parts coming from everywhere. On their newer product lines, they technically have a mass production line: the aircraft are slowly but continuously dragged from one side of the building to another, with various bits added as they move. Very impressive - and clean - icon of modern industry.

Kim as an Avatar! 

Then we had a day off, just lounging around. The highlight would be a lasagne we made. Our third day in Seattle was the most busy; we started on an entertaining but obnoxiously loud Duck Tour - a drive around the city and Lake Union in a converted amphious APC. Good fun. Kim's first motorboat experience! After, we wandered the area around the Space Needle. We couldn't afford to go up the top and couldn't play our Vegas trick, so I settled by climbing modern art around the base, large, abstract structures that constitued 2% of the Space Needle's build cost. Good fun, imminently climbable. We went into the Seattle Center to see a bunch of Nirvana stuff, played some music and checked out some Avatar and Battlestar exhibits. We strolled uptown and did the famous Underworld tour: Seattle, like Chicago, had its streets raised. Unlike Chicago, the pavements and sidewalks at the original street level are still accesible in places, and a preserved - if somewhat grimy - image of the original streets and storefronts can be seen. We returned up to Phil for one more night with him.