July has begun, which means a) in a couple days there will be lots of fireworks, and b) I better begin exiting my “just recharging” mode and start ramping up into full-on “trip planning” mode.
In the meantime, I did a little traveling in the homeland. Last weekend, my friend April and I took a small trip up to Seattle, something we had both been fantasizing about for some time. Between a sister who had scored us both free flights and a travelzoo.com deal that got us almost half off the nightly rate at a four-star hotel, the two of us were ready to blow our unspent millions on the modest, unsuspecting home of Microsoft and Starbucks.
That started with a $40 taxi ride from the airport to Bellevue, where our hotel was located. It turns out a direct bus ride would have set us back $5 in total. Oops. OK, I’m going to be traveling on a shoestring in a couple months, but there was room for one splurge, especially with a good friend I’d never traveled with before.
That evening, we took it easy with a bus ride across the lake to Market Street in Ballard, a charming area with a Scandinavian history. There, we learned the sun takes its sweet time setting in Seattle. It was almost 9 at night before we realized we should get going, and though by then the sun had turned a deeper orange, the sky was still bright blue.
The next day was more ambitious. We probably spent a good hour in the Seattle Central Library, a massive glass-skinned structure that houses a continuous, spiraling collection of books. On the way to Volunteer Park, our bus stopped in front of a parade, which was on its way, it turns out, to the park for this year’s Queerfest.
“How fortuitous,” April said. We weren’t going to get a leisurely walk in the park; we were going to eat greasy festival food and watch, among other things, a man skate about wearing only – and I mean only – a pair of rollerblades. I would have taken pictures, but it didn’t seem right, or particularly tasteful.
After swinging by Bruce Lee’s and Brandon Lee’s graves, which were just next door, we visited Seattle’s Experience Music Project, an undulating metallic Gehry museum. There we watched Britney and Justin sing together as Mouseketeers, learned how to play the drums, and recorded a 90-second video diary on our mutual connection to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
The next day we hit the place all Seattle tourists must hit: Pike Place Market. Though April didn’t get to be tossed like a fish as she had hoped, she did buy a brew from the original Starbucks, and we both had a bowl of the city’s world-famous chowder before leaving for the nearby Seattle Art Museum. On the second floor of the museum, fatigue struck, and we hustled back to Bellevue half-conscious to alternately snooze and watch “Dirty Jobs” on TV.
By the evening of the following day, we were both back in L.A.
Check out more pictures on Flickr.
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