I’ve spent the past few days on the West Coast for work. Today I am in
San Francisco, and before this I was in
Seattle. I was lucky enough to extend the business part of my trip to fly into
Seattle on Saturday morning to check out the city and hang with former-Austinite/friend Sean.
Erin, another former Jersey girl, and I landed Saturday morning to shower Sean with Austin love in the way of salsa and airport trinkets. Sean’s place is in Queen Anne, which is very cool neighborhood on the top of a very large hill.
We had an excellent weekend checking out Seattle. Saturday, we grabbed delicious falafels near Pioneer Square before heading on a tour of the underground city. The tour was great. Our guide was humorous, and Seattle development history is fascinating.
Afterward, we head to Pike’s Peak Market. We looked at the original Starbucks, but the coffee isn’t worth waiting in a big line for, so we grabbed some at a shop next door. We wandered through the market admiring ridiculously cheap large bouquets of flowers. We purchased some sweet potato pasta to make with our Seattle Cooking Night ™ Sunday dinner.
Erin was the official trip photographer. Her pics are here. My much less impressive collection is on my Flickr.
After checking out downtown, Erin and I went running- triathlon training follows me everywhere - on a path along the Puget Sound. To say the least, the views are much nicer than down at Town Lake.
For dinner we headed out for delicious Seattle sushi, after which Sean took us jetlagged girls home and I immediately passed out.
Sunday, we woke to some overcast rainy Seattle weather. This comes as no surprise to, well, anyone, but Seattle is colder and rainier than Austin. Intellectually I understand that. However, whatever part of my brain (clearly not the intellect) was in charge of packing, didn’t understand that.
So I lacked proper gear. We headed to the fanciest REI I’ve ever seen, complete with its own 2 –story waterfall to stock up. A fleece and rain jacket later, I shouldn’t get caught unprepared in wet-kinda-cold-but-not-freezing weather again.
We headed out to Snoqualmie Falls for a short hike. The landscape was gorgeous. The waterfall was beautiful, the ground lush and green. The rain and fog didn’t detract at all. Afterward, we hit up a local Pho shop for gigantic bowls of chicken soup.
Getting lost on our way to the ferries provided us with our best plan of the weekend – to get drunk in the middle of our Sunday afternoon. We hunkered down at a bar near Sean’s, had a couple pitchers of cider and chatted about all sorts of things. We followed up the bar with grocery shopping, and drunk cooking. The first inaugural Seattle cooking night involved bread and brie, the sweet potato pasta with chicken and walnut, cheese sauce, some asparagus, and large bowls of ice cream topped with sautéed peaches. Erin and I followed it up by immediately passing out on Sean’s couch. At 9 pm.
Monday morning, we had breakfast at Sean’s local Texas-themed food spot, and then Sean and I headed into our respective jobs.
I landed into SF last night, and am crashing with Becca while here. Last night we went for (more) sushi. I was lucky enough to finish up work earlier than expected today. The weather is gorgeous so I shopped on Valencia, grabbed coffee toffee ice cream at a local ice cream shop, and enjoyed just a little bit of down time sitting on Becca’s couch enjoying the breeze.
Tomorrow I head home. I am very much looking forward to my 3-day weekend back in Austin. I hear we’re going camping! And I’m not in charge of organizing it!
