For the past 15 years, I've managed to make a trip to Seattle in August. Mainly, it's to celebrate Brian's birthday (#48 this year... yikes!), but also because the weather is so nice - sunny and mild, but most importantly, no rain. The new light rail extension makes it really easy to commute from Redmond to downtown. When I go out to Redmond, though, Brian and I mostly play board games. This time out of 8 games, I managed to beat him once. That's quite an accomplishment, because usually I don't win any games at all.
I spent a lot of time downtown sketching. There are so many quirky things to see and there is a coffee shop on almost every street corner.
This time I checked out an area called South Lake Union (SLU for short). When I first saw this sign, I thought I was back in St Louis at St Louis University (also known as SLU).
South Lake Union is home to the Amazon headquarters. The executive leadership has their offices in the buildings called The Spheres. I wasn't able to go inside, because they are only open for tours on the weekends, but you can see through the glass walls to the gardens inside. The designers think that "connecting with nature increases creativity and reduces mental fatigue." Hmmm... kind of intriguing. There was an old airstream trailer in the grounds in front of The Spheres that was being used as a Community Banana Stand. Twice I went there and picked up a free banana for my lunch.
I thought this area looked really good to try out Courtney's acrylic paint technique. The middle picture took me the longest. It's the sunshade that covers the dog park on the right side of The Spheres. I don't know why I forgot to take a real photo of it, because Charlie would have loved it. There wasn't a lot of space to run around, but there were lots of dogs using it.
On this visit, I stayed an extra day so I could take the ferry over to Bainbridge Island. It's such a nice way to see spectacular views of the waterfront. It's hard to tell from this photo, but the Space Needle is behind the Ferris wheel. I was fascinated by the Bainbridge ferry dock. Since the Bainbridge ferry transports cars as well as people, the ferry comes in under a road ramp. Hydraulic motors lower the asphalt roadway down onto the ferry deck, so the cars can drive off. There's a much smaller ramp off to the side for walk-on passengers to exit the ferry.
While I was on the boat, I picked up a brochure for a troll. It seems like every town's got one. So, I followed the map to the waterfront trail and went looking for Sakai Park (that's where the troll was hidden). The troll ended up being a mile and a half from the ferry terminal and looked a lot like the Breckenridge troll, but with a Suquamish twist (the indigenous tribe of the Pacific Northwest). I noticed that most of the other tourists didn't walk up to see the troll but drove.
When I scheduled my trip to Seattle, I purposefully wanted to miss the FIFA World Cup crowds. However, everywhere I looked I saw Chivas fans from the Guadalajara, Mexico soccer team. You'd think they'd won the tournament, but they didn't. I guess the fans just didn't want to go back home.
But after 5 days, I headed back to the airport for the trip home. I really dread the Seattle airport, because it is just too small to accommodate all the passengers moving through it. The restrooms, especially, are way too small. But rather than adding more toilets, they had signs up saying they were installing sensors to make your restroom experience more enjoyable. As far as I could see, all they'd installed so far were the signs, because there were no sensors in that bathroom that I could find. They even still had flush-levers on the toilets. I should have taken this as a premonition of more hassles to come, because later that day they shut down the Denver airport due to a really severe hail, wind, and rain storm. Our plane circled around Colorado for an hour trying to wait out the storm, but finally got too low on gas and had to land in Albuquerque, New Mexico to refuel. Good grief. I finally made it back home that evening. The customer service reps in Albuquerque begged us not to get off the plane, because there were no flights back to Denver. So, lunch and dinner that day ended up being 3 bags of munchies. Luckily, I was sitting in the "extra legroom" seats; the regular passengers only got 1 bag.
