Wednesday and Thursday 28th / 29th August
I decided for Wednesday and Thursday, I would cross the border and head down into the US and visit Seattle. It's a cheap coach journey and takes about 4hours.
It was an early start with my bus leaving at 6.30 but a very smooth run, arriving in Seattle ahead of schedule.
In hindsight I should have been a little more prepared. The bus dropped us off and I had no idea where I was or where I was going to go. Luckily there was a coffee shop with free WiFi so I jumped online quickly to get my bearings. That was kind of ok but I still didn't really know what I was going to do.
I headed first to Pike Place Market, hoping I may find a tourist information centre and get some ideas. The market is crazy. Again, just lots of produce being sold but the market itself is huge and multi levelled but is like a maze and really quite run down, still bustling with atmosphere though. I spent a good couple of hours here and found the gum wall... Some back alley by the market has walls literally coated in chewing gum. The full reason for this I'm unsure but over the years it has become an attraction with more people constant adding to it... On one hand you walk down thinking 'oh it smells kind of minty fresh' but then on the other you realise it's actually quite disgusting!
Pike Place is also where the very first Starbucks appeared (it dawned on me then why their filtered coffee is called Pike Place) I didn’t bother going in but took a photo anyway. The queues of idiots... Sorry I mean tourists... Waiting I line just to buy some coffee was ridiculous!
I walked some more and eventually found a tourist office and a map, from there I walked more, visited the space needle and found yet another craft brewery where I sampled more beer!
It was a short stay and there where things I didn't get to do that I wish I had, but it was interesting to see somewhere different. Seattle is strange and I don't know quite how to describe it, nor whether it was what I was expecting. It seems like it's trying to be something but not quite getting there. It has quite a history with the gold rush and there are some interesting underground tours which I guess would have helped me understand, I just ran out of time.
I stayed overnight with a couch surfer, and the headed home on the 10am coach. This was supposed to have got me back to Vancouver at 2...wishful thinking. An accident on the freeway set us back almost an hour and then customs took forever... Not helped by two people on our coach... One didn't have all his paperwork in order so had to redo it all, and the other, a young lad of maybe 18 or so, that was sat next to me got pulled aside and questioned. Next thing we know they put him in cuffs and cart him away. Our driver reckoned he had drugs on him. All I know is that he had spent a lot of the journey to that point talking to his mum on the phone and arrange going dinner reservations... Ooops!
Exhausted, I arrived back 2.5 hours later than planned. I did very little that night!
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