I Only Wish I Would Have Seen a Horse of a Different Color

On August 29th I decide that I am going to go up to Seattle. The day before I make a phone call and meet up with Doug Oaksford in the Emerald City. Now I will admit that I was not particularly happy with how the day started.

The day started with me waking up at 5:45 in the am. Now I will admit that I was going to wake up at 6am anyway but there is something about waking up in the 5 o'clock hour and earlier that just does not settle well with me. So I decide to watch some way early Saturday morning TV (which is mostly infomercials fyi) and then went on to getting ready and the on the road. First of all, it is almost a three hour drive to Seattle from Vancouver. I was thinking it would be two hours, but evidently my guess of distance between Seattle and Vancouver on the atlas was off by a good 40-50 miles. Secondly, it was raining. Go figure, it was raining in Washington, the problem was that when you are tired and kinda sleepy you don't want to be driving under grey cloudy skies and the occasional shower. But after almost three hours of driving I finally make it to Doug's house in Seattle and the adventure begins.

First thing we do is make our way to a monorail that starts (or ends?) near the Space Needle and makes its way into Downtown Seattle and a round trip ticket is $4. So we ride the monorail for 90 seconds (really, that's all it took) and head down to Pike's Place. We walk down to the first Starbucks, and I have to admit, it was a little disappointing. It looked like every other Starbucks and didn't really show much if any indication that this the first Starbucks. Anyway we walk around the market for a while and look at some cool shops and then make our way to Pioneer Square where the underground tour of Seattle takes place.

It's about an hour until I tour so decide to eat lunch at the very same place where we bought our tickets. I had some wonderful crab cakes and fries while Doug had a bowl of mac and cheese. I have to say that my lunch was better, but I'm not a fan of mac and cheese, so just about anything would have been better than that. After lunch we were herded into an adjoining room and were told some brief history of the area where the tour would take place. And then we are divided into different groups to start the tour.

Now let me start by saying that we had an amazing tour guide, she was witty, funny and just excited enough that it got others into the tour without being oppressive. She could be a jungle tour guide at Disneyland. But I digress; the tour was pretty cool and I found out that Seattle (at least large portions of downtown) was built on the second story of Seattle. The first floor (the ground level) actually is underground due to unfortunate events, but now it makes for a cool tour. Evidently all sorts of dastardly deeds happened at the turn of the 20th century when the underground came to be, including prostitution, gambling and other haberdashery (I'm pretty sure that is not what I want it to mean, but it sounds bad).

So our next stop on our downtown adventure was a store near the Sound that had all sorts of oddities and weird things in it. It really was a tourist store but the owner had some how been able to come across and own all sorts of oddities. You may be asking, what kind of oddities? Well, I'll tell you: four-legged chickens, human bones, two headed lambs, shrunken heads, mummies (not the Egyptian kind) and that's just the beginning. It was way cool and full of all sorts of different things. And our next stop didn't really happen. Let me explain.

I was in Seattle four years ago on choir tour with CLU's University Choir. A few of my friends met up with a mutual friend of ours and some of her friends and they took us to a place called Rainbow Condom (at least that is what I think it was called) and it was a pretty funny little store that had more condoms than any one store should have. But they literally had condoms in just about every imaginable shape and color. Now here I am four years later and Doug had never been to this place and I think that it would be great to take him there. So now I have a general idea as to where it is, so I look it up on my phone and I find an address. So now the search begins. We go to where it tells us to go, and it's not there. We walk up and down the streets, looking in different little shopping centers and no dice. So as we are walking down the street I look at my phone again to make sure we are at the right place. And as we are walking down the street a woman with a baby asks us if she could help us with directions. I look at Doug and we both say no. Now I know that this is Seattle and it probably was not the weirdest thing that this woman had seen or heard but to me, the two of us asking the woman with a child where a condom store was, was a little beyond where I was willing to go. So we never found the place, and it's sad because I think it would have been fun.

So we go back to the Monorail and head back towards the Space Needle. Now I didn't go up the Space Needle, every person that I've talked to has said that it is way over rated and too expensive. But we did go into the Sci-Fi museum that is right there by the Space Needle. Now I will admit that the $15 dollar price for the museum was a bit pricey for what I saw, but it was a pretty cool little museum. After a little over an hour of walking around the museum we made our way to what Doug called the Gas Works, which is a park in Seattle that over looks downtown Seattle. Now the reason that the park is called the Gas Works is because the park is built around and in an old Oil Refinery. It was a pretty cool little place and I got some pretty cool pics.

After this we went to get dinner. We got pizza. Now, normally pizza isn't too exciting. But this was not your normal pizza place. The small pizza weighs about oh...2-3 pounds. It was fully loaded with toppings and I could see why this is Doug's favorite pizza place. The two of us couldn't finish one small pizza, it was that loaded. After pizza we made our way back to Doug's house and we watched one of the Futurama movies that has recently came out and then it was time for me to hit the road so I could make the long ride back to Vancouver.

All in all it was a pretty fun day and it was great to visit with a friend.