8/29/2015

Alex and I had visited some cities in the northeast, in the spring of 2015, but we hadn’t taken any time off since our November 2014 Italy trip. Finally, at the end of August, it was time to do some more traveling.

Alex hadn’t been north of California and wanted to see the Pacific Northwest, and I hadn’t been to Washington since 2013, so Washington State was a good compromise. We’d visit Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula.

The trip out was pretty painless overall: I’d recently discovered that a ~90 minute public transit commute from my apartment to the Newark airport could be reduced to a 20-minute Uber/Lyft ride (for about $5 more). Totally worth it. Our flight was first thing in the morning.

We napped en route and I woke up in the air over Washington, which meant I got a wonderful view of the Cascades as we flew in – not to mention the sprawling Seattle suburbs.

We didn’t have a lot planned for the first day: we’d get the main tourist sites, like Pike’s market out of the way, as well as checking out some of the other things downtown, like the new Seattle public library (awesome), and the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Site (which I’d last visited 17 years before). I enjoyed these smaller sights. The only problem was something we faced throughout our trip: bad weather. After a serious drought during the summer, it rained 7 out of 9 days on our trip.

The summer drought was so bad that there were a bunch of forest fires in the state, so everybody else was happy to see rain. Furthermore, there was a huge wind storm that practically knocked us over as we walked the streets.

When the weather finally cleared up, we played foosball and ping-pong in the park, then walked along the waterfront, making our way to the Olympic Sculpture Park, one of my favorite free locations in Seattle.

Refreshed by an Indian buffet, we went to our AirBnB. I’ll admit – I wasn’t sure what to expect. And it was a crazy place! There was a nice view over northern Seattle, and the person we were renting from had 3 units, including two tiny wagons he’d built himself.

But the highlight was the animals: in addition to a small garden, thee were 6-7 chickens roaming the yard in search of worms. And two incredible rabbits we could pet (at first I thought these rabbits were Silkie chickens), but in fact they were Angora rabbits (named Nibbler and Tribble). To top it off, we got free postcards with studio-style closeups of the rabbits. Score!