Advertisement
Published: April 24th 2018
Edit Blog Post
Calgary mallWe’ve made it to Seattle after a slightly tortious journey from Banff. First we went to Calgary for a few days to stay with an old school friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in over 30 years. It was good to see him and to meet his wife and teenage son who I’d not met before.
Whilst we were in a major city we also sorted out the shipping of our ski gear back to Australia and took the opportunity to buy some much needed clothes that should last us until we reach Europe.
On a fine day we walked into central Calgary, which is an OK city but too be honest not desperately interesting for visitors, but I did like the connected walkway concept that links the business towers and shopping areas with each other using elevated internal walkways, which means you don’t need to walk in the street much which is pretty good idea in the Calgary winter!
From Calgary we took an overnight Greyhound bus back to Vancouver, effectively re-tracing our last 6 weeks, and then another Greyhound to Seattle. We looked at catching the train from Vancouver, but on closer inspection realised that
Chess in Calgary mallmost train services were in fact buses and more expensive than the Greyhound.
In Seattle we have a hostel room which is good, well located but not cheap. It’s on the edge of Chinatown so we have no problem finding Chinese food for dinner but slightly more problem finding anywhere good that serves alcohol, but in the next block stumble on a pizza/beer café which is just what we need after almost 24 hours travelling.
We thought about how long to stay in Seattle and though there is probably much here that would have easily filled 2 or 3 days have decided to keep our stay to just 1 night so we only have a morning to take in the sights. We walk to Pikes Place Market on the Waterfront where apart from the market itself – which is a bit touristy but still good – we find 3 interesting sights – a fish shop (famous for them throwing the fish but not when we are there), the gum wall and the original Starbucks coffee shop. We manage to get back to the hostel before it begins to rain too hard, but rain is what you expect here.
Downtown Seattle That is about all we manage to see of Seattle, though we do get a glimpse of the Space Needle from the bus on our way out to pick up our RV.
The RV is a 25’ monster (there was a 30' one but this is large for me anyway), that sleeps up to 5. For 2 of us it should be very spacious. We collect the RV, provision nearby and hit the freeway south, though find it busy and slow clearing Seattle area, so it is dark by the time we reach the area south of Mt Rainer where we have planned to stop for the night. It’s a free stay area, a practice e known as Boondocking and possible, with care, in many places in North America. In our RV we are very self-contained so will try to free camp where possible, but will also use RV parks where we can connect to mains electricity, water and dump the grey and black water tanks. 1
st night looks Ok so far so good.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.204s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 8; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0835s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb