I slowly opened my eyes to the morning sunlight at 8:30 in
the front room of that big D-house in Seattle. A lot of the guys had already
headed off for work that Tuesday, so I had plenty of peace and quiet to work
with as I slowly got ready to start driving again. I remember there was a
window in the bathroom that couldn’t be blocked, which made me very
conservative in my towel placement…
I got all packed up, and ran into Danny in the kitchen, who
asked about what my plans were for the rest of my time in Seattle. I told him
I’d be out of the city by lunchtime, but I had been told by my friend Russell
Thompson that I needed to go see Roy Street coffee shop in the Capitol Hill
neighborhood to the south, and I also had to check out a coffee hut, or a
coffee shop drive-thru kiosk if I had a chance. I’d asked Russell if I could
stay with him, but he was out of town; he did his best to give good
recommendations on places to go in Seattle though. He mentioned the joy of
seeing all the hipsters in Capitol Hill, but I had a real live one in this
house, I think Danny could be considered hipster. He had holes left over in his
ears from having the big, round studs there at one time. Danny gave me a great
rundown of a place called Vivace in Capitol Hill, and told me about how good
their Americano is. He went the extra mile though, by then filling me in on the
history of how the Americano beverage came into being, involving American GI’s
requesting adding water to shots of espresso when they were fighting the
Germans in Italy in World War 2 because they couldn’t handle straight espresso
like the Italians were used to. Very interesting history lesson!
I know it’s a low quality picture, but here’s a shot of the
I-5 bridge that I didn’t have to take to cross Portage Bay to reach Capitol
Hill, Top Gun anthem playing in the background of course:
I drove down 10th Ave., turned right on Roy
Street, and found a good parking spot by some houses near a school. Free
parking! I walked the few blocks to the coffee shop, and thus the Coffee Shop
Hat Trick began. You heard me.
Here’s some pictures from my walk around the Capitol Hill
neighborhood, at 11am:
First off, Roy Street. I ordered an iced latte and some kind
of cherry flavored pastry and sat down on one of their big, comfortable
couches. I started digging into both delicious items, and I called my friend
Grant in Waco, to report on how things were going so far. We had a good talk.
Second, I walked down Broadway East, past a few common fast
food places like a Qdoba burrito place, and walked into Vivace, the one Danny
had recommended, and ordered an iced Americano. Boy was he right, it was the
smoothest, highest quality Americano I’ve ever tasted, and that’s a bitter
drink. I sat there for a few minutes, nursing the drink in an actual glass, and
took an Instagram of me and the Duckies, revealing my full beard to the world
for the first time. I’d stopped shaving to see how the beard was coming in and
to save time in the mornings, and I was struck by how much I looked like my Dad
in this particular pic, which is still on Instagram.
After Vivace, I walked back to the car, and drove down Broadway
to a coffee hut like Russell Thompson had recommended, and ordered another iced latte there. Hat trick!
This was the 3rd coffee beverage I’d had in a one hour time frame. Thankfully
the female barista at the hut was not in a bikini like I’ve heard some are,
that wouldn’t have been good for me. You'd think I would've been quivering with pent up energy after ingesting so many caffeinated beverages in such a short time frame, but actually I was right where I needed to be energy-wise.
The next stop on my whirlwind tour of Seattle still wasn’t
the Space Needle, it was a park above the Space Needle in the Queen Anne
neighborhood called Kerry Park that had been recommended to me by Ryan or one
of the other guys at my host house that night. I’d asked for a free place to
take pictures of the whole city, and this park hit the spot! First I had to
navigate my way along the semi-tricky layout of Seattle avenues like Mercer
St., Broad St. Roy again and up Queen Anne Ave:
Again, Seattle is hillier than I had remembered, which makes
it feel more like San Francisco than Portland at times. And it’s denser than
some West Coast cities, as you can gather by noticing how often I end up
walking rather than driving to places close by in Seattle. And yeah, who
wouldn’t want to get a car wash at the Pink Elephant SUPER Car Wash:
Ironically, I passed right by the Space Needle on the way to
the park:
I parked the car on Highland Drive next to the overlook, and
realized it was very bright that day and I needed wisdom on what settings to
use on the camera to best capture the scene. Naturally, I gave Charlie Roch a
call; he was at work, crunching numbers at a desk, so I felt very good about
where I was then. He mentioned a tiny aperture of F-11, to let in less light
while giving quality depth of field for objects miles away, which in order were
Space Needle, Downtown Seattle, and Mount Rainier to the south. Voila!
I just love looking at these pictures, it’s images like
these that make the Northwest look really appealing. This was when I started
using a technique called bracketing, where I took 3 of the same picture: one
overexposed, one properly exposed, and one underexposed, and selected the best
of each set as photos to display in this blog. Bracketing was Charlie’s idea,
of course. It was still challenging to get properly lit shots of the Duckies
posing before that background while not having them wildly out of focus, but I
got a few decent ones:
Here’s what the surrounding Queen Anne neighborhood and
flowers looked like:
This was a place I couldn’t get enough of, like the
Bonneville Salt Flats, but with literally infinitely more trees and other greenery. It was, call it an “honor”, to get to see Mount Rainier from so
far away, 9 months of the year it’s shrouded by mist, fog, clouds, gloom, etc.
Now, for lunch, I’d consulted Yelp so that I could eat in
the Queen Anne section of town, and it led me to a restaurant called 5 Spot,
which serves various foods from all over the Americas. I can’t remember what
dish I ordered, I just know it was big and good and definitely not
fish’n’chips.
Full from 5 Spot, I drove over to I-5 south to do battle
with some Seattle traffic and get on I-90 to go eat to Spokane:
Don’t worry, we were going very slow when I took the
pictures with all the cars around me. Mom would’ve hated that part of getting
out of Seattle, lots of cars on that highway. Getting on I-90 East involves multiple tunnels and a long
bridge across Lake Washington with a killer view:
It’s a four hour drive from Seattle to Spokane, and for the
first two hours, that’s totally a good thing. It’s one amazing view after
another of thickly forested mountains, lakes, granite mountaintops, blue
skies, all seen from uniform quality interstate highway:
That lake was Keechelus Lake, I-90 passes right along the
shore. I was feeling better this afternoon than 24 hours earlier, when I’d been
bent out of shape going from Portland to Seattle. This was helped by my success
in getting ahold of my Spokane host on Facebook to arrange an arrival time and
address for her house in Spokane, as I’d been locked out of my Couch Surfing
account online for a few days. So there I was, wailing away with INXS songs and
drinking in the evergreen mountainousness spread all around me, when I came to
the town of Ellensburg, where I took a pit stop and got some gas, and the
landscape turned…ugly? Maybe we'll politely call it "bland". With the windmills and lack of green plants east of
Ellensburg, it even started to look like my home area of West Texas, which is
not appealing, especially compared with the forests I’d just left:
I found out from Debi and Rob later that the dry areas east
of Ellensburg are called the Scablands by the folks in Spokane, and I can see
why they call it that. There was also some flat farmland east of Ellensburg,
and you know how farmland and I get along famously…there was something on fire
too off the highway:
Thankfully, as I pulled into Spokane on I-90 near
dinnertime, the pine trees started reappearing, and so did some big hills.
Spokane is another one of those mid-sized US cities like Boise that have around
200,000 in the city proper and 500,000ish in the metro area, which tends to
round out the bottom of the 100 most populous cities in the country. Spokane is
fairly spread out, in a grid format, with a modest collection of buildings
downtown:
Debi’s house wasn’t too hard to find, just a couple miles
north of the highway, past John Stockton’s gymnasium. He’s very involved in
girls’ basketball in Spokane, where he’s from, his daughters play high school
ball I think. I didn’t go inside; I rooted against him and Karl Malone with all
my might in the late 90’s when they faced MJ, Scottie and the Bulls twice in
the NBA Finals. I had called Debi to let her know I was close, our
communication had been spotty ever since my Couch Surfing account got locked.
When I parked in front of her two story house, I got out without my stuff first
and met her at the front door, then she helped me get all my junk up the stairs
and into one of the bedrooms up there. It had been inhabited by one of her
sons, now grown up and moved away, so she and her husband tended to use that
room for other Couch Surfers looking for a place to stay in Spokane.
I started talking to Debi as she was making dinner, and
got to know a little of what Rob and she did for a living and for fun around
town. Rob was involved in building a giant machine that holds zillions of blood
samples for labs, if I’m remembering that right. Debi could hear that I speak
my American English without a noticeable accent, and so she thought (out loud),
that I must not be from Texas, but then where was I from originally? My answer
was “nope, born and raised in Texas”. She was surprised, in a good way!
When Rob got home, we sat down at the dinner table, said
grace, and dug into a very tasty meal of pork chops and fettuccini alfredo, mmm!
I had been quite hungry and thirsty when I’d gotten to Spokane, so that meal
really hit the spot for me that evening. Afterwards, Rob and Debi were waxing
poetic about bygone days when they’d been living in Alaska, raising their kids
in a rural cabin. They had really enjoyed living there, and they told me about
other great road trips they’d taken with their kids throughout the US over the
years. One I remember in particular involved driving to different national
parks in southern Utah, experiencing many facets of natural beauty each day
that week. I was inspired by that trip, it sounded like something I’d like to
do someday. My friend Justin can attest to the incredible scenery there in
Utah, he went there a few months ago with his girlfriend and family.
Rob went to bed fairly early, he’d been up since the butt
crack of dawn to work a long day. Debi stayed up a couple more hours with me
at the dining room table as I did some research for the next few days and
uploaded photos from Seattle. She showed me several annual festivals that are
held in Spokane each year, including one that is the world’s largest 3 on 3
basketball tournament, held downtown. She gave me the impression that in
general, Spokane is a place with lots of outdoor activities to take part in and
more to do than you would think in a city of that size. She and Rob clearly
like being there. The best thing she told me about was a charity Rubber Ducky
race held each year in the river, that features 10,000 Rubber Duckies like the
two I’d been carrying with me! I thought my friends Myranda and Erin would like
to be a part of that, so I gave Debbie some money to buy us each a Duckie for
the 2013 race. I’ll have to ask if our entries won anything.
After midnight, Debi called it a night, and I went
upstairs to my comfortable bottom bunk bed and fired up the ipod, drifting off
to much appreciated sleep, so I wasn’t really couch surfing, more like bunk bed
surfing…good night!
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