I hate listening to people talk about their vacations. I understand how they were adventurous and restorative experiences, but too often listening to the trip or looking at the pictures is the kind of thing I find myself only being able to politely endure, because the enthusiasm with which the vacation is retold never translates well to someone who wasn’t there to experience it themselves. Having said that, I’ll cut right to the interesting parts of my recent trip to Washington state. And I’ll skip the photos entirely.
*I get stressed pretty easily about flying -- not so much the flying part, but the whole getting through security on time and not being stranded in Chicago kind of thing. It just seems like too much can go wrong, and on my way out it sort of did. My connecting flight was delayed an hour, and when we finally got on I was trapped in a window seat between the side of the plane and a 317-pound poster boy for sleep apnea, who snorted himself awake every eight minutes all the way to Denver. I was very happy to deplane and grab a quick lunch while waiting in a quiet corner at the gate for my flight to Seattle. Which I enjoyed, right up until the moment Larry the Cable Guy’s in-laws came along and sat down behind me for half an hour. The flight to Seattle was delayed about an hour due to the weather in Denver, though not until we were already on the runway. This was mostly okay though, because I fell in love with our flight attendant Jamie about six minutes after I sat down. She looked good in her librarian glasses and airline shorts, and spoke with just enough of a southern lilt to make everything she said sound vaguely and dangerously flirtatious.
*I stayed with my friends Dax and Melissa, who live just outside of Seattle. Dax works out of their home and has some flexibility in his schedule so we were able to check out sights while Melissa was at work. The first big visit was Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, a shopping experience not entirely unlike a day at the Minnesota State Fair. Pike Place is three stories worth of fish market / farmer’s market / craft fair / tourist trap / food court / shopping mall full of stores selling things that nobody could possibly need. It’s so crowded you need to walk through it sideways and look ten feet ahead to navigate your way through everyone else. We saw at least a dozen different street musicians playing while we were there; it occurred to me that if all of these people got together and collaborated, they’d make up the most eclectic orchestra imaginable. The vendors we encountered were unfailingly friendly, except for the fish guy who was trying to give me a complex when I wasn’t immediately willing to ship 15 pounds of fresh salmon to every person I know.
*With the fourth of July approaching Dax really wanted to get some fireworks, so we went on a run after Melissa came home. There were signs along the highway advertising “Boom City,” a temporary explosion mall located on a reservation where a wider variety of combustion promised to be available. And holy smokes, was it. Boom City was the size of a county fair, and looked scary enough to make me think it was the kind of place where the quasi-criminals populating the backgrounds of movies like “The Fast and the Furious” would go to buy their fireworks. A couple days later we found a newspaper article about Boom City, where one of the carnies -- I mean, vendors -- had been asked about what seemed like the legal gray area of what they were selling. He said they stayed within the law, because, and I quote: “It ain’t worth the felony.” Which is the kind of statement that implies there could possibly be a list of things in his worldview that would be worth the felony. But apparently selling $1,300 packages of fireworks was just fine. It didn’t take us more than a few minutes to decide we were out of our league, and we quickly retreated to a friendly little tent outside of a nearby grocery store.
*Last winter when I was first planning my trip, Dax told me that Rush was going to be playing Washington in early July, so we decided to go. Regular Summer Vacation readers know I saw Rush just last summer, and seeing them again seemed like it’d be a good time even if it would be the identical show from the same tour. (Although it turned out to be the very last show of the tour, so that was kind of cool.)
The real draw this time was to see a show at The Gorge. This is a world-famous amphitheater in central Washington that has the Columbia river and its resulting canyon -- or gorge, I suppose -- for a backdrop. The Gorge is really remote, the nearest bit of civilization being a truck stop of a town called George. Yes. George, Washington... I know! This place is so far removed from the rest of the world that people living here would have to travel to the middle of nowhere for a night on the town. We took the interstate through the Cascade mountains to get there, so we did take in quite a bit of scenery not generally found in Anoka County. The climate shifted so dramatically on the eastern side of the mountains it was like traveling to another region: instead of the lush, green cool of the Seattle area, we were surrounded by dry brush and rock formations, with a good twenty-degree summer-like jump in the temperature. The view at The Gorge is transcendent, and the sound was great. I can’t imagine a better place for a midsummer concert. The one drawback? Sitting on a hill with a forty-degree grade messes with your balance.
*The next day we took the ferry over to Poulsbo, where Dax’s parents live. They have a great house with a stunning backyard. Calling it a garden wouldn’t do it justice -- it’s more of a private arboretum. When Dax’s mom, Lynn, mentioned something about shopping at the farmer’s market in town (which I’m sure was amazing), I couldn’t see the point: There had to be twenty different fruits and vegetables growing there between the yard and the rooftop garden above the garage.
Poulsbo would be the most blatant tourist trap imaginable if it had been intentionally created, but instead it just exists as it is. It was all genuinely small-town Americana: a downtown of nice restaurants and specialty shops, a band shell in the park, art shops and bookstores, a boardwalk along the waterfront, all tied together by Norwegian heritage. After touring the town, we spent the evening at a neighborhood picnic, complete with music playing, more food than seventy-plus people there could possibly eat, and kids running around in a massive water fight all night long. It was great fun to be a casual observer of it all, and worth noting that I did in fact hold a brief lead in the men's 18-and-older division for the Cherry Pit Spitting Contest.
We stayed at the picnic until it was dark and cool enough to collect the sweatshirts and blankets we needed before walking down to a small park overlooking the water, where we could see hundreds -- seriously, I’m not exaggerating here, I mean hundreds -- of enormous boats waiting for the fireworks. They’d been parked down there all day. We joked about the challenges presented by anyone trying to navigate their way out of that when the show ended; it would have been difficult enough in the dark, much less sober. Which likely didn’t describe too many captains by that time of the night. But it was a perfect location. The last fireworks I intentionally sat down to watch were over a shallow mud hole of a lake formed in a river bend. This year they were over Puget Sound. Make your own comparison.
*Dax and I spent most of the actual 4th of July regressing to fourteen years old: sleeping late, watching TV, playing video games, driving around listening to music, going to Five Guys for lunch. When Melissa got home from work, dinner was ribs on the grill, homemade onion rings and potato salad, and my first corn on the cob of the summer. Not a bad meal for the 4th. While the events of the day went on, the Washington Statewide Fireworks began. Now, Minnesota people who complain about their neighbors shooting off fireworks? No. You don’t get sympathy from me anymore. Because Washington on the 4th is INSANE. There was so much popping and crackling and pounding and whistling and screaming throughout the day, it was enough to turn a mildly ADHD kid inside out. When it was dark enough for the real show to begin, it continued on for at least three hours. Constantly. There were more professional-grade fireworks being shot off within a two-mile radius than I could follow, including the display by all the neighbors in Melissa and Dax’s cul-de-sac. There are few things I’ve seen in recent memory as disconcerting as the sight of an eight year-old kid in flip flops using a propane torch to light the fuse on a $30 chemical mixture that could melt bone, then yelling “Fire in the hole!” and jogging away. Things finally started quieting after midnight... but notice I didn’t say “stopped.” It was still going on when I fell asleep, which wasn’t as hard to do as you might think, because it became so easy to tune out all of the noise by then. But the dogs were not pleased.
*My return trip was blessedly uneventful, and the morning sky was uncharacteristically clear and we could see Mount Rainier dominating the southern horizon on the way to the airport. The whole experience was a great trip, and just the break I needed. And even though we ate really well the whole time, there was so much to do and so much walking around that I actually dropped a few pounds while I was there.
Can’t ask for much more than that.
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