Our Place

Well, how silly of me.  Here I am, talking about the cool things going on around the neighborhood and espousing the virtues of Ikea, and I haven't even talked about one of the more important aspects of our move:  our apartment!

I had a few people ask me to put up pictures of the place when we first moved in, but I did my best to stall.  Mostly because it looked a bit like this:

In other words, it was a total mess!  But that's to be expected, I suppose.  With all of the moving and boxes and mess and all...  The real problem, though, was our complete lack of furniture.  No desks (the card table definitely wasn't going to accommodate both of us), no bed, no ... anything!

That all changed a couple of days later after we went to Ikea (which I promise I won't mention again unless I get some sort of sponsorship) and started to get unpacked and settled in.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we bought a couple of desks and a mattress, and the place started to look a little better.  Until we get more furniture, this is what the place looks like now:

The computer room.

The bedroom and closet.

Last but not least, the kitchen!

I did mention that the place was pretty small, didn't I?  If you'll notice, I made sure at least part of the bed was in every shot just to give some sense of scale.  And I guess I didn't get any pictures of the corner that has the door and the refrigerator, but ... you get the idea.

You may also notice that I didn't mention the bathroom.  That's mostly because there isn't one.  Not in the traditional "my apartment comes with its very own bathroom" sort of way.  You see, three of the other apartments on our floor are also tiny-ass studios with no bathroom, so we share one!  Or, more accurately, one bathroom and two individual shower rooms.  It's really not as bad as it sounds (unless you wake up in the middle of the night with a very sudden urge to pee).  They get cleaned fairly regularly, and not by me.  That's right ... I don't have to clean a bathroom ever.  And since we only share it with three or four other people, it's rarely occupied when you need it.  Yeah, it does get a little gross every now and then, but I've certainly suffered much worse.  And did I mention that I never have to clean it?

There are a couple of other neat things about our place.  First and foremost is the location.  Moving up here from so far away, we really didn't know a whole lot about the neighborhoods themselves.  As it turns out, Queen Anne is a pretty cool place!  We're close to Seattle Center, which is kind of touristy, but there are always cool things going on.  We can walk to three different grocery stores, tons of restaurants, and if we want to go downtown, we can either walk (if we're feeling spunky ... it's about a mile and a half) or take the Seattle Center Monorail.

Neither one of us have really utilized the other neat thing about our place yet.  Our building has a back yard!  Complete with a deck that has a BBQ grill, a smoker, and a picnic table!  Not to mention a couple of shady little corners for reading or getting cozy with your portable gaming device of choice, I suppose.  I don't have any pictures of the back yard yet, but I'll take a few once I actually go check it out.  Which I'll probably do sometime over the next couple of days...  It gets a little warm in here sometimes!

Come to think of it, I don't have any pictures of the outside of our place either, but I do have this Google street view thing I can share.  It's been painted since the last time the Google car has been by.  It's now a nice shade of blue with off-white trim.  Very classy.  Our apartment is the second floor place on the right, in case you feel like coming by and throwing stuff through our windows.  Hehehe...

While you're at it, take a little Google tour around the neighborhood.  Who knows?  You might decide you want to come on up and be our neighbor, too!

Seafair!

From Olympus, the gaze of Neptune, King of the Sea, turns to the western margin of the oceans — just north of the forty-seventh degree of latitude — the eyes of Neptune trace the course of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

In the days of summer, Neptune approached Jupiter to request: “Brother and Chief, I beseech you to grant me liberty to hold a carnival for those who love the sea in the seaport of my choice — Seattle, where dwell on seven hills a salty citizenry who pledge their allegiance as Loyal Subjects of King Neptune. Here, in this Port of Pleasure, I will bid welcome all the mortals of the Seven Seas.”

Neptune, King of the Seas then declared: “Each year during the seventh month, shall begin a grand and glorious summer festival for the purpose of celebrating the bountiful wealth and beauty which has been bestowed upon the port city of Seattle: the emerald in the crown of my beloved Pacific Northwest. This festival shall be called Seafair.”

Presiding over Seafair as his representative on earth, was designated a man and woman of honor and accomplishment, King Neptune Rex and Queen Alcyone. They protected the city from Captain Kidd and his rowdy band of Pirates. The Seafair Pirates, Captain Kidd and Davy Jones annually storm Alki Beach and battle King Neptune and his Royal Court in a theatrical display of swashbuckling sword play for control of the Seafair Festival.

Captain Kidd, Davy Jones and the boisterous buccaneers’ attempts to capture the Seafair Festival are successful. However, in a summertime gesture of goodwill on Torchlight Parade Night, Davy Jones and Captain Kidd reach an accord with King Neptune and agree to be Royal Protectors of the Seafair Festival and dubbed Seafair Guests of Honor.

To personify the goodness and pageantry of the celebration, a Miss Seafair was selected from among the most talented and charitable young women of Seattle’s surrounding communities. And from these communities rose a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and flavors — Seafair!

To appeal to the diverse nature and interests of the salty citizenry, the festivities included games of sport and skill, pomp and ceremony, and celebrations of heritage and culture. To inspire laughter, there were the court jesters — Seafair Clowns. There was jubilation, music, dancing, art and parades with flourish of trumpet, with beat of drums, with flying colors, a glittering toast to their lives so enriched by the sea.

Neptune further proclaimed: “Seattle shall open her arms to visitors during Seafair time. My festivals shall be a display of warmth and community spirit. All worldly cares shall be put away and smiles and celebration shall reign.”

Thus spoke Neptune, and so began the annual tradition of Seafair, premier festival in the Northwest for all people to enjoy.

The Legend of Seafair...  Before we went to the parade that was getting ready to happen down the street, I found this on the official Seafair website.  Legends like this always make fairs seem more fun.  It adds a bit of imagination and "history" to the celebrations.

And so we walked down the street (about three blocks) to the staging area of the parade.  Several of the floats representing the huge international community in Seattle were here waiting for the call to be given for the parade to officially begin.

We continued on our way down the street to find a good spot to watch the parade, finding a place in the shadow of the Space Needle.  Before too long, the parade started.  The various floats celebrated the cultural diversity of the city itself and displayed the festival royalty of the surrounding communities.  There was also a prominent showing of the festival clowns and pirates and, of course, marching bands!

But, instead of just trying to describe the parade itself ... some pictures!

Marching band from Calgary

One of my favorite parts of the parade: a marching band made up entirely of old people!

Firefighters with bagpipes?  Yes, please!

Mexican dancing horses.

Seafair clowns!

The China Town Dragon Team, another one of my favorite parts of the parade.

Overall, the parade was ... well, it was a parade!  It was a lot of fun, and I think I learned a thing or two about Seattle and the surrounding areas.  One thing is for sure, I'm definitely looking forward to next year's Seafair!

The First Days

Hm.  It seems I've been a little lazy about blogging this week.  I should probably try to remedy that problem.  The adventures keep piling up, and I haven't even written about our first days in town yet!  I suppose I should get on it...

The first day, we got into town a little too early to get the keys to our place.  We drove around the neighborhood a bit before we decided to head to Ikea.  We knew we were going to need some furniture for our new abode eventually, and we had a few hours to kill.  Why not check out this nearly mythical store of awesome everyone keeps talking about?

So, with the car still heaped full of our stuff and the help of our trusty Tom Tom, we pulled into the Ikea parking lot.  At first, the store was a bit overwhelming and terribly confusing.  What the hell were all of these "bin number" tags on everything, and why did every piece of furniture come in eight separate pieces?!  Once we made it through the lab rat maze that was the showroom floor, though, it was pretty easy to figure out.  We found ourselves in the self-service warehouse, where all of the aisle/bin numbers actually represented something.  And why did everything come in eight separate pieces...?  Because of the modular nature of their furniture, the same legs or shelf pieces or what have you can be used for several different models.  Ingenious! Or at least I thought so.  I'm very easily impressed...

We didn't have any room in the car to buy anything at the time, so we did some pricing and a bit of aimless wandering.  By the time we were done acting like stupid Ikea tourists, it was almost 4.  We figured it was about time to head back toward the apartment.  We thought we might get back early, but if we did, it would give us time to do some more wandering around the neighborhood.

I'd heard that traffic in Seattle was pretty bad, but that the worst of it was along the east-west corridors.  Coming into the city from the south along I-5 pre-rush hour, I figured we would be okay.  And this is where I was very, very wrong.  The roughly 19 mile trip from the Ikea store back to our apartment took around an hour and a half, most of that time being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic just a few miles out of downtown proper.  And this was only the first time.

So ... for those of you planning on coming to visit us?  Plan on doing a lot of walking, maybe a bit of bus riding.  I don't think I've moved my car for a week.  As bad as the traffic is, the parking situation is worse...

The next day, after much car unloading and a trip to Target, we went back to Ikea.  For a mattress and a couple of desks mostly but also ... for lunch!  That's right.  No trip to Ikea is complete without eating some Swedish meatballs in their restaurant.  For less than five dollars, you get a pile of meatballs, mashed potatoes, and a dab of lingonberry preserves.  There are other things,too ... fish and chips, pizza, salads, desserts, but ... those meatballs are damn good!

Annnnd there I go, going on about food again.  I do love a good meal!

After getting stuck in traffic again, we spent the rest of the night and most of the next day in and around the apartment.  We slept on our Ikea mattress, which (even though at this point it's only a mattress on the floor) is one of the most comfortable beds I've ever had the pleasure of sleeping in.  We unpacked and settled in a bit.  And we discovered how little room we have for stuff in our tiny little apartment, pictures of which are coming soon, I promise!

Saturday afternoon, we started hearing a bunch of weird noise coming from the direction of the Seattle Center, which is just a couple of blocks south of us.  Mostly odd bursts of what sounded like Middle-Eastern or Indian music.  There was an innumerable amount of cars circling the neighborhood looking for places to park.  Something was either going on or about to happen!

We scoured the internet and found out about Seafair, a summer-long festival in Seattle and the surrounding communities celebrating he diversity and bounty of the sea and the Puget Sound area.  There would be car shows, Thunderboat races, cultural festivals, air shows, U.S. Navy ships, and ... parades!

And that was what was getting ready to happen just down the street.  The 62nd Annual Torchlight Parade!

In my next entry, I'll post pictures of the parade and talk about our first big voyage outside of our neighborhood on foot: over Queen Anne hill and into Fremont!

Transit, Day 3

The final day!  At last!  And fortunately much shorter than the day before: only about 8 hours as opposed to 13. We woke up early, still operating on Central Time, and headed downstairs for breakfast.

This free breakfast had its own surprises.  There we found the now familiar waffle station.  Instead of hard boiled eggs, however ... biscuits and gravy?!  YES!

Ah, yeah ... um, I really like food.

So, after delicious hotel breakfast number two, we loaded our things into the car, hit the gas station across the street, and proceeded to get the heck out of Idaho...

...only to be greeted with the corner of Oregon that really still just looks like Idaho.  Fortunately, that didn't last terribly long.  We found out that they grow a lot of onions in that particular part of Oregon.  That doesn't sound terribly interesting, but keep in mind I'm used to seeing fields of corn.  And soybeans.  And that's about it.  And, compared to the flat plains of nothingness, fields of onions can be pretty fascinating.

After the onions and flat nothingness, it started to get more interesting.  We followed a river through the Blue Mountains and into the vast expanses of pine that is the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.  I don't know that I'd ever seen so many huge pine trees!  The view from the top of one hill made it seem like they went on forever.

This wasn't the case, of course.  As we headed down the other side of the mountains, the trees thinned out and eventually disappeared all together.  We rounded the side of the last mountain and were greeted with a most spectacular view:  a plain of farmland so flat the ground actually faded away in the haze before you could see the horizon!  It was as if the world just ... vanished.

As it turns out, this was a particularly dangerous stretch of land for the old settlers on the Oregon Trail.  The Columbia Plateau was (and to some degree still is) a barren, dusty stretch of land on the way to the Columbia River.  There were hardly any trees or water along the plain, and many wagon-pulling animals were subjected to harsh dust storms and exhaustion.

Fortunately for us, we were driving a car and not a team of oxen, so the voyage was a little less arduous.  We were just as relieved, however, when we saw a bridge in the distance.  The Columbia River!  And on the other side, the last state in our cross-country voyage:  Washington.

Washington itself is an interesting state.  It's divided neatly into rainy forest land in the west and semi-dry rolling plains in the east by the Cascade Mountains.  There were some pretty interesting things in eastern Washington, namely fruit farms (Washington apples, peaches, and cherries, mostly) and...

Wineries.  Acres and acres of grape vines and wineries.  Apparently Washington is a big wine state which, had I known, would have made me even more excited to live here!  After more money starts to come in, I'll be sure to report back on that, being the novice wine lover that I am.

After a couple of hours (and a delicious, guacamole loaded California Whopper from Burger King), we started heading back into the mountains.  The first sign of the looming Cascades was a little glimpse of a snowy white peak off in the distance, and then another.  This seemed cool until we looked at the map and realized how far away these peaks actually were, and then it became really cool.  Even in the distance they looked huge, and they were literally hundreds of miles away!  The first peak that floated into view, we learned, was probably Mount Adams, weighing in at over 12,000 feet.  Shortly thereafter, we saw another peak.  It seemed to be slightly smaller, but really it was just much farther away.  That's right ... it was Mount Rainier!  At nearly 14,500 feet, it's no wonder we could see it from so far away.

We were rapidly approaching what was by far our favorite part of the trip.  With the mountains growing ever closer, we began to see signs for Snoqualmie Pass: the gateway through the Cascade Mountains to the Puget Sound area.  It was amazingly beautiful.  Almost too beautiful for words, in fact.  So, instead of words, here I present to you a series of pictures and videos of our trip through the pass:

After leaving the pass, I kept expecting to come around a bend in the highway and be assaulted by civilization.  Seattle was close, we knew.  The highway signs and mile markers told us we were rapidly closing in on our destination.  We passed through suburbs that we knew were there but couldn't see through the trees.  We were excited for our first look at the city we would call home, and it came to us in a pretty surprising way...

That's right!  Through tunnels!  As someone who hasn't spent a lot of time around mountains, driving through tunnels is pretty cool.  I'm sure it will get old after a while, though...  There are a lot of tunnels in and around Seattle.

And there you have it!  We finally made it.  For a three day drive, it really wasn't all that bad.  Honestly, it's a drive I would recommend!  It has something for everyone, really.  Beautiful landscapes, a sense of history, and a good look at how wild the Wild West still is to this day (Wyoming, I'm looking at you and all of your pronghorn antelopes).

Next time, I'll start to talk about Seattle proper: our first impressions, the trouble with traffic, and last but not least ... IKEA!

Transit, Day 2

The second day was by far the longest.  From just north of Denver to just north of Boise, Idaho is roughly a 13 hour drive.  Fortunately, we'd kept ourselves on Central Time, so it was nothing for us to get up by "6 a.m.", go get some free hotel breakfast, and hit the road.

I don't stay in hotels terribly often, and I suppose it had been a while since the last time I had a free hotel breakfast, but this one was pretty great!  They had the usual fare (bagels, pastries, yogurt, coffee, and juice), but they also had a couple of surprises:  hard boiled eggs and a waffle making station!  It was awesome!

Ahem, anyway...  After a full and gloriously free breakfast, we hit the highway and headed north into Wyoming.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect out of Wyoming.  Was it going to be boring like Kansas?  Mountainous and awesome?  Some sort of weird, half desert?  As it turns out, it was a little bit of everything, except boring.  Initially, near Cheyenne and about halfway across the state, Wyoming is covered in a flat, rolling plain with mountains looming on the horizon.  It looked a little something like this (and yes, I did have a wicked road sunburn):

It's not so hard to imagine vast herds of buffalo grazing, or cattle being shepherded along by cowboys to their summer pastures.  It was pretty easy to get lost in all of the romance of the "wild west".  We were in it!  And to be honest, it was pretty gall-darn beautiful.

As we headed west, closer to the mountains, the landscape became more dry and rocky.  Little foothills started to crop up around us as we slipped through a gap in the Rockies.

On our way through these little foothills, we started to see billboards for a place called Little America.  They had 50 cent ice cream cones!  Free WiFi!  Fresh fruit and souvenirs!  Marble showers!  It sounded like a pretty great tourist trap, and I was going to need gas, so we decided to check it out.

Little America was like a little oasis of civilization in the vast stretches of nothingness that spread out around it.  It was a small complex of brick buildings: a gas station, a truck stop, a hotel, and some little cabins for rent.  When we pulled up to the gas station, our car was nearly assaulted by a window washing teenager (he actually made me jump ... I wasn't expecting it at all).  He was very friendly, asked us where we were from, where we were going, and made some small talk.  I filled up the tank, and we headed inside.

As it turns out, Little America was a tourist trap, but not as awesome a trap as I was expecting.  They had the usual kitschy souvenirs (wolves and eagles painted with Native American designs, expensive local snack items for the road, decorative knives and belt buckles) and a vast selection of the convenience store food and beverages.  It was pretty boring, as it turns out.  But they had a little hot dog stand/restaurant, so we grabbed a couple of 'dogs and sat down for lunch.

Okay, only one more bit from Wyoming, and then it's on to Utah.  The bigger foothills (we were listening to podcasts, so ignore the audio):

Much like Wyoming, I didn't really know what to expect from Utah.  Other than creepy Mormon billboards all over welcoming home "Elder So-and-So", which we saw plenty of.  Going into Utah, the mountains became huge, towering beasts of red rock.  The road wound through them for quite some time.  From the border all the way to the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the views were pretty breathtaking.  See for yourself!

We never really got into SLC, just close enough to see a few of those creepy Mormon billboards I mentioned before.  North of the city, we drove through a scrubby little forest and the land started to flatten out.  It was on into Idaho we went!

Yes, Idaho.  As I look through our collection of pictures and videos, I realize we didn't take any pictures or videos of Idaho.  Because ... well, Idaho is boring for the most part.  Flat and treeless as Kansas, except for the little bits of cool canyon carved out by the Snake River that the highway brought us close to.  It made for a pretty painful last three hours of a very long day of driving.

There was quite a bit of construction as we neared Boise, but traffic was light.  By the time we rolled into town, we were once again exhausted and hungry.  We checked in, grabbed some fast food dinner, and passed out knowing that tomorrow was the big day!

Transit, Day 1

Three solid days of driving.  I'd meant to post every night during the trip, but plans change.  Sometimes they change quite unexpectedly.  Like when you leave to start a road trip halfway across the country and only make it three blocks from your house in the first three hours...

We had spent a lot of the previous evening and most of the early morning packing the car on Tuesday.  It was hot.  Really hot.  We were both dripping sweat, and the car was packed to the ceiling.  So, when it was finally time to hit the road, I didn't think twice when I heard a kind of gravelly "pop" from the back end of the car.  I figured the car had gained a few pounds so a little gravel-grinding was to be expected.

Two blocks later, though, my tire pressure sensor started to go off.  We both heard the flat tire flopping around behind us.  When we pulled off into our friendly neighborhood QuikTrip, the tire was completely flat.  Chad went in and bought a can of Fix-a-Flat.  But when I was backing the car up to get the valve stem in place, he found the culprit.  A great big screw stuck in the tread!  Knowing at that point that the Fix-a-Flat would do more harm than good, we did what any responsible adults would do.

We called our parents.

Now, this isn't necessarily something we would normally do.  Normally, we'd jack up the car and pull out the spare, take the tire to get it patched, and be on our merry way.  In this case, though, the spare tire was buried under all of our remaining worldly possessions, and to get to it, we would have had to unload all of those possessions out onto the sidewalk at a QuikTrip in midtown Kansas City.  Not going to happen.

My mom was the first to answer the call.  She left work and came downtown with a jack and some tools.  Once we got the tire off, we noticed that not only was there a big fat screw jammed into the tire but a nail, too.  Oddly enough, it was right next to the screw, maybe four inches closer to the inside of the tire.  Now, getting a screw in your tire in your own driveway is strange enough, especially since no one around us is really doing any sort of construction at all, but a nail too?  And I heard the tire go as soon as I started backing up.

Strange, isn't it?

To make an already long story a little shorter, we managed to get the tire fixed.  My mom is a super hero.  And after standing around in the hot Kansas City heat for three hours during this whole ordeal, we were sweaty, tired, and ready to hit the road.  Onward to Denver!

The drive across Kansas was, as usual, uneventful.  I'm pretty glad to say that I'll most likely never have to drive across that state ever again.  I've heard the argument that the Flint Hills are gorgeous blah-blah-blah, but really?  The drive across Kansas is like six hours!  The Flint Hills are, at best, an hour of that drive.  Yes, they're pretty.  The rest of the state, however, can suck it.

And at first, Colorado wasn't much better.  It was flat, and there was nothing to look at.  Fortunately, though, you can see really far,  so you can see a whole lot of nothing.

There's one part of the drive into Colorado that changes all of that.  I noticed we were slowly climbing uphill (mostly because I couldn't convince my poor little loaded down car to go fast anymore).  We went over a few long hills and, over the crest of one of them ... the whole world seemed to open up and spread out below us.  We'd come over the ridge of a huge valley!  Suddenly, being able to see really far was really cool...

Not long after, the Rocky Mountains came into view on the horizon.  Chad had never really seen the mountains before (other than the mountains in Tennessee on our road trip to Florida last year), so I think he was pretty impressed.  Not only with the mountains, but with the sudden, crazy little storms that seem to pop over them.

Just before dark, we ran into one of them.  We could see it coming for a while, and I kept checking the radar to see whether or not we would run into it.  We did eventually, and it looked a little bit like this:

One of my favorite things about the Midwest are its storms and the crazy shapes the clouds make.  Right before it started to rain so hard we couldn't see, Chad got a picture of a prime example.  Probably the lat crazy Midwestern clouds we would see for a good long time:

Fortunately, the storm was pretty brief, but the clouds stuck around.  It got dark not long after we'd passed through the storm, and we finally made it to Denver.  Our hotel was just on the other side of the city, in Westminster, Colorado.  After being somewhat led astray by our GPS and taking a few perfectly legal U-turns, we arrived at the hotel, checked in (it was a lot easier than we thought it would be), and grabbed a bite to eat, we passed right out.  It had been a long day, but the next day was going to be even longer...

Pre-Transplantation II

Tuesday.  Tuesday is the day we leave.  And it's already Saturday...

At least it's finally starting to look like someone is moving out of here, though.  I mean, as long as you don't look at the kitchen.  Or the bathroom, for that matter.  But most of our stuff is gone.  Some friends just came over and hauled off Chad's desk and most of the bed.  Garbage is going to the dumpster practically by the truck-load.  Our stuff is mostly packed and piled together in one place, and I think it will all fit in the car.  I hope.

It's hard to believe how much stuff a person can accumulate.  By stuff, I mean junk mostly.  That's one thing this move will definitely accomplish - getting rid of all of the clutter.  We've taken a long hard look at our "stuff" several times and made some tough decisions on what's really important to us.  Have we learned anything from it?  Probably not.  But I do know one thing...  There will be a lot more art and music making going on when we get there!

And hopefully less wall-scrubbing.  How do these things get so gorram dirty...?

Pre-Transplantation I

Well, here we are.  We've been planning our move from Kansas City to Seattle, Washington for over a year now, and it's finally happening next week!  No more sweltering summers or frigid winters buried in snow, all of the fresh seafood I can stand, and beautiful national parks and state forests to explore.

But before all of the rainy days and "too-good-to-be-true-ness," we've got to get there.  We have most everything packed.  I'm pretty sure it will all fit in the car...  We have our apartment nailed down at the deposit in the mail (if it's not already there).  It seems like everything is well in order.

Except it never is...  Moving is one of those things where you think  you've got everything under control until the last minute, and then you realize there were a million things you forgot to do and a lot of people you wanted to see one last time.  I'm at a point now where I constantly feel like I should be doing something to get ready but can never think of anything to do...

So here, friends, is this chronicle of last minute madness and road trip hi-jinks and, hopefully, good things to come.  And for all of you who've been living this move vicariously through us over the last weeks ... there's that, too.

Until the next update!