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Published: February 12th 2008
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Obfuscator writes - Well, I know it's been a while since we updated, and that's because we've been in Seattle since around the 27th of January. We left Roseburg that morning, and drove toward Portland. The whole drive from Roseburg to Portland was in the mountains, and it was a heck of a snow storm, which of course meant that everyone was puttering along the interstate at 40 MPH. After quite an infuriating drive there, we stopped in Salem to see the capitol. Salem didn't appear to have much else to see, but we walked around the capitol building for a while, since we couldn't get in (it was Sunday). The building itself looked interesting enough. The design is definitely unconventional. No dome, for one thing. It had some shabby looking renovations going on on one side of it. There was a nice garden around it though, with a nice memorial to Congressional Medal of Honor winners from Oregon. The memorial told the story of each winner, which was pretty interesting.
We drove into Portland after that, and cruised around the town a bit. We didn't have anything in particular that we wanted to see, so we contented ourselves with
just driving around a bit to see what it looks like. It seemed like it could be pretty, but didn't seem too special or anything. Then again, it was sort of a crummy day. We stopped in a little Chinese restaurant for lunch though. Afterward, we crossed over to the Washington side of the Columbia, and stopped at historic Fort Vancouver. We didn't have much time before they were closing, by the time we got there, but we walked around to all the buildings. Fort Vancouver never saw any action or anything, and mostly just served to keep supplies and make sure the Colonists didn't get too uppity on the West Coast.
We finished our drive up to Seattle, and had a good time reacquainting ourselves with the enormous dogs that our Uncle M maintains. The following day, our Uncle T arrived in Seattle, and we had a great time with both of them, before they left on Wednesday. My friend D arrived that evening, and though she spent most of the next week being sick, we did manage to get to the Seattle Aquarium and take a harbor cruise while she was here, as well as going out
for a good birthday dinner. The Aquarium was really nifty, with all sorts of neat fish, and some cool tanks that you could reach into and touch all sorts of nifty sea creatures. They also had huge Pacific Octopi, and we got to watch them being fed.
After D went back to Madison, we've managed to see a few more neat things, including the Discovery Science Museum (which is pretty kiddy oriented, but still sort of fun), the Underground Tour, Smith Tower, the Scandanavian Heritage Museum, and the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee. The Underground tour is sweet, but I definitely advise doing it on a weekday, as it was really packed on Saturday. Seattle's downtown was largely built on a tidal flat, which made it extremely problematic twice a day, until they raised street level about 10 feet. This solved the tidal problem, but made a lot of first floors of buildings entirely useless except as storage. It also left the sidewalks as trenches next to the roads for a couple of years while the city raised money to finish them. Eventually, they finished them off, and left an extensive underground city for people to tour. The
tour is given by witty tour guides who will crack jokes the whole time, but if ours is any indicator, they also really know their stuff, and can tell you a lot about the city.
Smith Tower was at one time, the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. It no longer is, but it's still a pretty building that you can go up, and has great views of Seattle. The floor you get to walk around is called the Chinese Room, and it has all sorts of really cool furniture and custom made ceilings and floors from the last Empress of China, as a gift to Smith. It's also one of the only tall buildings we've ever been in where they haven't yet covered the entire outside in plexiglass. When you went outside on this floor, you had only bars between you and a huge fall, which was really nice, since the glass always messes with pictures a lot.
The Scandanavian Heritage Museum is really well done, and was largely built by a Danish Museum. It's got a ton of information about Scandanavian Immigration to the US, and particularly to the Pacific Northwest. It was really fascinating,
and had great exhibits, including some sweet LEGO constructs of Norse myths.
Honestly, largely we've had lots of time on our hands, and that's led to perhaps even more of our strange conversations than normal. For instance, just the other day, we were talking about the use of the word "wordsmith." Back around New Years, NPR had their yearly report about the words and phrases that had been voted most annoying of the year, and that one was on it. We decided that if we ever turn to writing, our euphamistic, pretentious phrases for what we do will be either "Wordsmashing" or "Wordspewing." Seems appropriate.
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