Greetings. Welcome to my travelog on my trip to Seattle (August 31, 2000-September 6, 2000). I travelled up there on business and took some time to capture the sights and sounds of the trip, and the area. I had never been to Washington state, so I was looking forward to checking it out.

My flight left New Orleans quite early. After a brief stop in Salt Lake City, I ended up in Seattle around noon. The flight afforded me some pretty nice views out of the window. In between the beautiful imagery of flying above the clouds at more than 4 miles above the surface of the earth, I could also see mountains and other features.

Most of these pictures were taken with a new digital Camcorder I purchased just for this trip. The Sony DCR-PC100. It's a Mini-DV Digital camera that also does megapixel-resolution stills. It worked really well - my only complaint is that the jpeg compression for the still images is pretty bad. I wish there was an option to not compress the images to improve quality, but there isn't.

The first stop after getting into town was to check out the Pike Place Market. This is an outdoor marketplace. Very similar to New Orleans French Market, but in my opinion, a lot nicer - the prices were more reasonable than I expected as well.

Admittedly, my trip involved doing a lot of predictable, "touristy" things, but well, it was all new to me.

The Pike Place Market was incredibly colorful. There were sections selling fresh seafood - including Dungeoness Crabs, Salmon, Clams, Oysters; other areas with gorgeous fruits and vegetables and gifts and flowers. When you walked through the section of fresh flowers, the smell was amazing.

 
This was an interesting assortment of all kinds of peppers, strung together in a nice display. They were for sale. I thought it was really colorful, though I don't know if I'd want to buy it, considering in a week or two, it probably wouldn't look nearly as nice!

As expected, fish were everywhere. Seattle seems to be more seafood-oriented than New Orleans, and with good reason. There seems to be a lot more variety here, including a lot of foreign and Alaskan seafood which moves through the ports. This is the market where one of the guys from MTV's "Real World Seattle" worked, where they toss the fish to the guy behind the counter when you order something. This is one-part fish store, one-part theatrics; a lot of fun to watch.

There was a huge selection of organic fruits and vegetables. I really like the fact that the people in the Northwest are a lot more concious of the negative effects of pestisides. Of course there's also a sizeable vegetarian population here.

All-in-all, I think the prices were comparable to what I'd pay at the local market here, though the produce was much better looking - in some cases even better looking than your typical inorganic counterparts. Usually the organic section of my supermarket is pretty pathetic.

The market actually comprises several blocks and several levels. At the top are foods and as you go down lower (it's located on a slope downward to the Puget Sound) you run into interesting gift shops, antique and collectable stores, etc.

Since it was a Wednesday, and Labor day weekend was coming up, we opted to hit a few new "tourist traps" first, before the big crowds come in for the holiday. First stop was Seattle Center, a section of town where the Space Needle and a bunch of attractions are located. This is also the site of the new Seattle Rock and Roll Museum.. I saw this building from the air and had no freakin' idea what it was. Upon closer examination, I'm still not sure what kind of drugs the architecht was on when he designed this building, but it was something pretty strong!

The rock and roll museum was first class! I mean, they spent millions of dollars on this place - everything was top-of-the-line. It should be considering they hit you up for twenty bucks to get inside! Considering all the neat exhibits, gadgets and gimmics within, it's probably worth it - it's a very neat place. I might argue over the priority given to many burned-out Seattle groups over more well-known counterparts (i.e. New Orleans' contribution to Rock and Roll history is limited to a mention of Fats Domino and a few artists; whereas more museum space is dedicated to 15-minute-bands like Sir Mix-A-Lot and Queensryche, who *wow* just happen to be from Seattle).

I can understand the Seattle emphasis, but it's pretty bizarre to see such a world-class museum promoting the history of many mediocre musical acts. But that's not enough to tarnish the excellent exhibits, including a very large section dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, and some wicked art sculptures like the three-story-tall mountain of guitars as pictured to the left.

The next day I met up with my friends and we headed out of the city proper, to explore the Olympic Peninsula. After lots of driving through the beautiful country side, we took a few ferries across Puget Sound to arrive at Port Townsend. Port Townsend is a true "artist's colony" - I hate to use that word because there are so many fake-ass, bullshit towns calling themselves Artist Colonies (Eureka Springs, Arkansas comes to mind), but this entire city was ultra cool, and seemed to be populated by every ex-hippie-burnout and college Philosophy professor in the region.

Yes, the Northwest is where Liberals get a bad name. These people are a little too far left if you ask me, willing to vote for Ralph Nader as a matter of principal instead of doing whatever possible to make sure the antichrist GW Bush doesn't get into office. With Al Gore being a very environmentally-friendly "green" president, he's still not "green" enough for many of these hippie Northwesterners... Hell if Ralph Nader became too popular, he'd probably be rejected by them as well! Nonetheless, I'd rather hang out with liberals than conservatives - at least liberals usually have something intelligent to say.

Here's a picture of the beach where we waited for Ferry #2 to take us to Port Townsend. Instead of sand, the beach was comprised of millions of beautifully-polished stones, rounded by the hands of time over countless millennia. The water was so clear, 5 feet looked more like 1 foot deep.

This was one of those moments where I completely lost track of the "real world." I became fixated on the beauty of this "beach", contrasted with my preconceived notion of how a typical beach was supposed to look. This wasn't necessarily the place where you'd want to run barefoot, but it had its own sights and sounds that were unparalleled. This was the first of many Northwestern beaches that I really dug. They are a far cry from Cali and the Gulf of Mexico in many ways.

Near the ferry landing was an old world war II fort. A huge concrete bunker built up on the hillside, supposedly to protect the land from an invasion by sea (which never came). I don't have any pictures of the fort here because well, they're not terribly exciting. You can see them here and here. It was basically a big concrete bunker with all the hardware removed. I hear this locale is where they filmed some parts of the movie, "An Officer and a Gentleman."

I was more impressed with the view of the coast.

Here's where I got my first vibe on the typical Northwesterner. We're waiting to take the ferry, and it's announced that the ferry has broken down and we'll be delayed at least an hour, maybe two. Does anyone complain? Nope. They just hop out of their cars and go hang out on the beach! Most of the people have dogs (not kids) with them - there were dogs everywhere. It was so cool! I was amazed at the patience and laid back attitude everyone had.

Port Townsend was a really neat city. There were lots of interesting shops, good restaurants and a lot of activity. I also found the people quite friendly. The town isn't very large, but some of the architechture is impressive. To the left is one of the buildings on the city's main strip.

We hung out in Port Townsend until around sunset, found a nice microbrewery and had a few beers, then headed out through Sequim, Dungeoness, Port Angeles, looking for someplace to stay at the last minute. We found a Best Western nestled in the woodlands and crashed there for the night. The next morning, the scenery was a bit different - we moved from travelling along the water to going through the woods; the terrain became more and more green as we moved west.