Sleepless in Seattle

Seattle - After our brief stay in Oregon we moved on to Seattle Washington. It was the second of July and Seattle seemed like a nice place to rest for a few days and wait out the up coming holiday. After all, there’s no sense in getting into the holiday traffic if you don’t need to. Now mind you our goal is to avoid, at all cost, crowds and hassles (more on this in a moment).

You remember how I mentioned the overcast weather we found in Oregon? Well when we arrived in Seattle they are in the middle of the hottest, sunniest July on record. Nothing but clear blue skies and 80 to 90 degree weather. The weather is so unusual that I swear you would see people just standing outside, mouth agape staring up at the sky. If they were a bunch of turkeys and it started to rain they would drown. Naw, these guys understand rain, they would run for cover at the nearest Starbucks.

On the third of July we decided to visit the famous Pikes Market in downtown Seattle. Wow what a treat. There was so much to see and do. Piles of fresh fruits, vegetable and beautiful cut flowers for sale for as far as the eye could see. And the famous fish market where they throw fish to the amazement of the crowd was not a disappointment. Every corner seemed to have another street musician playing funky music. The atmosphere was electric.

One of our quests is to try local foods as we travel so we purchased several items at the market. We selected fresh Copper River Sockeye Salmon filet (expensive but oh so good!) from the famous Pikes Fish market. But since it was a filet instead of a whole fish they didn’t throw it for us, oh well. Then we got a few vegetable and some fruit. Fresh cherries and peaches were my choices. Back at the trailer, I selected one of the peaches to fix for a little snack and on the bottom of the peach there’s a sticker, “California grown”! Oh well, it was good anyway.

So by now you are wondering what fun, exciting Fourth of July celebration did we attend in beautiful Seattle with record breaking sunny weather. Well, we didn’t. Oh there were many to pick from with one of the largest drawing over 400 thousand. Nope we opted instead to head into Vancouver BC. Now don’t think us unpatriotic we just wanted to see Vancouver before we had to move on and well there’s that crowd thing. We were in Canada for only a few miles when the traffic began to slow. Then it began to stop. We got caught in one of the worst traffic jams in I think Vancouver’s history! Seems a big rig had crashed on one of the bridges, caught fire and the whole freeway was shut down for several hours. A couple of hours later (it seemed a lot longer than that) we made it to the next exit, we took our chance and turned around heading back to Seattle without seeing anything of Vancouver.

Back at camp we barbequed a nice tri-tip roast and had a wonderful meal. Ah, life is good. It had been a hot, stressful day so it was so nice to just relax after having a wonderful meal and turn in for a good night’s sleep. It was about that time when the war broke out. At least that’s what it seemed like. Fireworks were going off all around. They are legal here and it seemed everyone had tons to blow up. Wow how exciting. We could see explosions in any direction. But having seen fireworks many times before I am not all that impressed. I just want to go to bed. The explosions continued however for literally hours. I think I finally fell asleep out of exhaustion around 2 AM. Sleepless in Seattle!

Road Revelation #4 – All is not what it appears to be, look closely.
When buying local produce, be the one to make the selections rather than the helpful clerk behind the counter. You may not get what you think it is if you don’t.