Part of the big question of this trip was “Can I do an extended trip without having a plan in place?”. It turns out that the answer is a very qualified yes; I can do it, but I’m really bad at it, and much like the silk rope producing spiders in the Get Smart movie, I do not like it.

The planning as I go bit, that is. The actual travel part is fun, it’s the figuring out where to go next, how to get there, and where to sleep bit that I’m not a fan of.

Seeing as I’ve been traveling for a month and a half, I think that’s long enough that I’m OK with ending the wandering and just planning the next month out. So I did.

• From Portland, I’m taking a train to San Francisco. It’s an overnight trip, but only just, so I’m not bothering with a sleeper.
• In San Francisco for four and a bit days.
  It’s an early departure, so to take the advice of Eben, I’m going to be packed up the night before, so that all I have to do is wake up, grab my stuff, and leave the room.
• From San Francisco, train to Los Angeles. This one’s a day train, though it’ll be a long-ass day.
• In LA for a day, with a late-night departure the next day.
  The LA bit is to catch up with Andrei, though the timing is needed to catch the next train in the sequence, so that worked out nicely.
• From Los Angeles, train to New Orleans. This one’s a two-night trip, so … I’ll be in my sleeper cabin.
• Three days in New Orleans, staying in a hotel at the edge of the French Quarter.
• From New Orleans, train to Chicago. It’s an overnight, and I went for a sleeper this time.
• Four days and change in Chicago.
• From Chicago, there’s a train to Indianapolis, arriving at ten to midnight, because Amtrak hates sleep.
• Four days in Indianapolis.
• From Indianapolis, a train back to Chicago, leaving at 6am, because of the Amtrak campaign against sleep.
• A day and a half, give or take, in Chicago.

And after that, it’s all pretty normal; Fly to Iceland, spend a week in Reykjavik, fly to London, join a tribe of Squirrels, … The usual travel stuff.

For anyone curious about actual times and dates; This is what the inside of my mind looks like.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that this is a reliable source, but for what it’s worth, here it is.

The hotel is nice, and seems to be what I needed after a sleep-light time in Seattle.
There is art. And a sofa.

There is a bed, and a screen so that you can tell where the ‘bedroom’ begins.

There is also a view, with trees.
If I’m right, those more distant trees are in Washington.

I got myself a 7-day travel pass for getting around, and tested it out by taking a trip to the airport.
OK, it’s just up the road, and was only two stops, but having bought the thing at a station (from a machine, which dispensed change in coins only) I kind of wanted to use it.

The MAX/light rail runs right up to the airport terminal; Maybe 100m & an escalator ride between the train and the check-in desks.
Auckland International, please learn from this.
Seattle, you’re OK, but your signage could be better.

Caught up with a friend from New Zealand.
Well, they’re from the US, but we met in NZ?
Anyway, we had dinner, and climbed Mt. Tabor, and generally chatted about how things had been for the last five years or so.

I’d like to point out that Mt. Tabor has the most interesting water reservoir buildings I’ve ever seen, with a distinctly ‘castle’ vibe to the construction.

Took this photo because, … Well, because it made me laugh.

This one was taken in a place called Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, just down the road from the hotel at one end of the strip-mall cluster, which I think is referred to as Cascades Station. I messed up the angle, I’m thinking, because it’s much flatter in real life than it appears here.
Not 100% on what that glow effect is.

Portland has a Saturday Market down by the river, which I went to.
In the rain.

I’d started looking for something in a hat to keep the sun off while I was in Seattle, but hadn’t had a lot of luck.
Found this in one of the stalls at the far end of the market (the market stretches from under a bridge at the riverbank back a couple of blocks, so it’s occasionally interrupted by roads) , and was sold by the fact that it’s also waterproof.

There are a number of artists set up there, including one with a familiar style.
Found a piece that I recognised from an image meme – Your future self is watching you right now through your memories

Click the link for the website – http://www.jrslattum.com/

We had a fun chat which did touch upon the topic of credit, and how clear his signature isn’t on that meme.

I also tried an Elephant’s Ear, which turns out to be a naan-ish thing that you can expect to shed sugar & cinnamon pretty much everywhere.

On the advice of the aforementioned friend, I went to Washington Park & ambled around in the green stuff.
Conveniently, the MAX line which goes by the hotel went through the park, which was a real time-saver.
Interestingly, the line passes under the park, so you get off at a station which is maybe 300′ below ground, and take an elevator up to emerge … next to a carpark.
It’s understandable, but I’m just imagining a situation where the building for the elevators is the only structure in a clearing, surrounded by forest.

There’s quite a lot of the park; What’s shown here is some of it.
I was impressed by the trail mapping.

And by the signposting.
I remember some of the training walks we did for Team W.T.F where the trail markers required you to be standing right next to a marker to see the next one.
And be 7′ tall.

And then there’s all the green stuff.

And then there was the Redwood Deck.

As it was Talk Like A Pirate Day, it seemed the time to take a shot which looked as nautical as possible, and this is what I came up with; A ship threading it’s way through a treacherous forest, trying not to scrape the hull open on a tree as it passes by to starboard.

I’d started playing with a thing that I’m pretty sure I found out about from a former co-worker; what3words

The idea is that, rather than referring to a location by numeric coordinates, it uses three words, which will hopefully be easier to remember & harder to transpose, double-up, or drop.
It may go the way of Swatch Internet Time / Beat Time / Biel Meantime, but the names are fun.

I slept like absolute crap last night.
Dreadful.
Not helped by an enormous amount of noise outside, and someone pointing their bed-lamp out the window & straight at the window of the room I was in, so there was about half of the head of the bed which was too bright to sleep in.
I was tempted to get up and use the mirror from my kitbag to brighten up their day too, but the roommate was sleeping. (also unwell)

Still, it made for an early start and getting to the train station with time to spare.

Mt. Rainier still being visible.

For a while there in Seattle, it looked like the mountain was getting closer.
It was impossibly far off when I first saw it, and then every subsequent day it got clearer, the features easier to see.

There’s not much to say about the train trip.
It was comfy, the scenery was nice, and it beats the hell out of dealing with airports & airport security.

Conveniently, the Portland MAX light rail system is right beside the Amtrak terminal, so getting to my hotel out by the airport was fairly simple. (I’m not a huge fan of the security theatre of airports, but I’m rapidly becoming a fan of airport hotels with cheap rates and easy public transport access)
I say ‘right next to’ the Amtrak station, but it’s actually right next to the Greyhound station, which is across the street from Union Station. There’s a wide variety of people there, some waiting, some begging, a few having a loud argument across the street at each other, …

The hotel room’s nice; Artwork isn’t quite Hostess Cupcake II from the Doubletree in Chicago, but it’s not boring.

And the WiFi was up to the task of streaming Mikey Mason’s Revenge of the Hufflepuff show on Concert Window.
Turns out that I could hook Pangur Ban up to the TV & watch he show in Big-O-Vision.

Last full day in Seattle, and the thing I had to get done was printing off my train ticket to Portland. Fortunately, an opportunistic wander past an Amtrak Quik-Trac machine (not convinced I’ve spelled that correctly, but I’m also pretty sure they haven’t either, so I’ll leave it be for now) demonstrated that their barcode scanner could read the QR tag from the PDF they’d emailed me off the screen of my phone. That’s pretty convenient, and I now have my boarding pass.

My first Tourist Thing was the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Seattle Unit.

There’s a huge amount of history packed into a very short period of time, but the gist of the thing is that a steamer came into Seattle with word of gold in the Klondike, and an enormous number of people buggered off to a place they’d never previously heard of. This included the Mayor, who resigned on the spot, various policemen, firefighters, the tramcar driver who just abandoned his vehicle in the street, …
You get the idea.

The standard rules applied; Most miners found nothing, few made back what it cost them to get there & mine, and a very few actually got rich. The folks supplying them, on the other hand, made out like bandits.
Seattle billed itself as being the gateway to the Klondike, and did pretty damn well out of that. In the words of the Tour Guide on my second tourist thing of the day; “Folks, we’re closer to Mexico”

In an odd way, the National Park in a building made me remember, fondly, some of the DOC area & field offices, and the various historical protection rangers who worked in them.

Out in Occidental Square, there was a temporary artwork alongside the Firefighter Memorial; A giant block of ice, calmly melting in the sun. On a cooler day it might have noticeably cooled the air around it, but this was not that day, and you really had to be within a few inches of it to feel the chill.

Note yet another photograph of a photographer.

Tourist thing number two was Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour.

Think an irreverent look at Seattle history where the tour guide is doing stand-up comedy, and you’ve got the idea.
I had to explain my Indianapolis Colts hat to two different people; Fortunately, “It’s a souvenir of Indy; I’ve never seen a Colts game in my life” doesn’t give you a lot to work with from a comedy point of view, so they went with the New Zealand angle, with an option on the beard, instead.

Things we learned about included;

• Seattle’s never say die spirit of taking a dumb idea and sticking with it, like long-drops on a beach.
• The wildly dodgy & corrupt sawmill owner who was repeatedly made Mayor, despite how many times he bankrupted the city.
• The agreement that, if someone’s cellphone rang during the tour, the guide was allowed to answer it as a Pirate.
• Filling in the mud-filled & potholed streets with sawdust, so that you ended up with streets of oatmeal.
• The fact that we were all provably weirdos, because we had chosen, on a rare sunny day in Seattle, to go underground.
• Wooden sewer pipes which, at times, were lower than the water they were draining into, leading to shit-fountains in people’s toilets if you flushed at the wrong time.
• The attempts to stop the Great Seattle Fire by blowing up the buildings in it’s path, which might have worked if the buildings weren’t wooden.

Following that fire, with the chance to rebuild, there was the plan to raise the street level to get rid of the ‘fountains of crap’ issue; Naturally, this didn’t go smoothly, and the city ended up with streets being raised after the buildings had been rebuilt, so that you had the ground floor of a building facing a retaining wall, at the top of which was the new street level.
In the pictures below, the left is the ground floor, the right is the retaining wall, and the roof overhead is what a footpath looks like from underneath.

The footpaths came later; There were disagreements over who should pay to link the new street level with what was still the second floor of the building, so while that was happening, they put in ladders to get people down to the existing entryways.

The founder of the tour company referred to this, and the number of drunk men who perished by falling down 8′ to 35′ holes beside buildings in the area of town where most of the saloons were, as Seattle’s One-Step Program.

Eventually, the gaps were roofed over, skylights put in to allow for shopping and suchlike to happen down there, and then the spaces were eventually closed off to try to defeat an outbreak of the plague.

And then re-opened during Prohibition for storage & unobserved access purposes.

The room we’re in in these last pictures was the ground-floor space of the building in the picture behind our tour guide.
Now the street starts on the second floor.

And here, left behind decades ago by the makers of a ‘scary film’, is a Big Red Couch.

Today I did tourist things, and went on a tour of the Boeing Factory in Everett, WA.

Where I was not run over by an aircraft engine, despite how this looks.

As you can see, this is merely part of a display of Bloody Great Engines.

And a section of aircraft fuselage used for testing.
Well, previously used for testing; I suspect it’s main use now is so that you can compare the modern composite to the section of aluminium fuselage in green next to it, and marvel at how many rivets there aren’t.

Also a display or two on the fine work available in custom fit-out work by Boeing; BBJ standing for Boeing Business Jets.
And nothing else.

I’d have enquired about prices, but my credit card was back at the hostel, in my locker.

There was also a ‘Family’ section, where one could hypothetically play with building carbon nanotubes from giant rubber shapes, or using magnets on ferrous nanomaterial fluid to see what they do with particles of differing sizes, or playing with Bernoulli’s Principle using an airstream and ping-pong balls.

Hypothetically.

Up on the roof, they had some pretty spectacular views of their airfield, and also of Mt. Baker, which was being unusually visible.

There’s an Antonov AN-124 in this shot … somewhere … which was delivering parts.
From the bus, we could see the stair/ladder to the flight deck un-retracting into the cargo space. Which is basically the whole inside of the aircraft.

A little further around was the Dreamlifter facility, but without a plane it’s sort of lacking in context.
Really big plane, based on a 747, looks like this;

And that’s where the photos end.
No photography allowed on the factory tour. Nor cellphones, nor electronic devices of any kind.
The tour ends by exiting through the gift shop, so you can keep your wallet.

The factory is huge.
The doors are size of football fields. Which sort? It doesn’t matter, the answer’s “yes”.
Access was via people & service tunnels under the working area, then up in big-ass freight elevators to galleries.

I suspect that there are any number of images and videos online which will paint a far better picture of what it’s like inside the largest building in the world than I can, so I’ll go for the vibe.

It’s not built on a human scale. It’s a machine into which people work, taking parts and assembling them within that machine into steadily larger and more complicated things, on jigs and systems so big that it takes time to figure out what they’re doing, if you can manage it at all. From the far end of this machine, aircraft emerge; Maybe one every month, maybe more frequently than that, or maybe one every 2½ days.

From one gallery we could look down into a cubicle farm, itself on a mezzanine level over the assembly floor. From another, we could see a row of workstations on a slow-moving platform transporting the nose & tail sections of the plane down one side of the room, whereupon they’d be joined together and cone back along the other side, to emerge as a finished-ish aircraft.

The paint shop was over the other side of a highway, so the planes are towed across a little bridge, usually at night to cut down on the rubberneck factor.

It’s a hell of a place. Also, there were some cargo trikes in evidence, for transport purposes, which … is nice. They may be building ridiculously high-tech aircraft with windows where you can select the darkness/opacity level using a little switch, but a bike is still the easiest way to get around.

I’ve been sleeping badly here, and last night was no exception, so it took me forever to get started. On the plus side, having a very late coffee allowed me to see the flood of Seahawks fans on their way to a football game. (US/Oval Ball Football)

There were a lot of hats, shirts, jerseys, and other paraphernalia of sports fandom. Then there were the people who’d gone all-out, like

• Seahawks Luchador guy
• People with dyed beards in the appropriate colours
• A guy wearing Seahawks-striped bib-front overalls and a foam hat in the shape of the emblem, but 3D

It was a fun thing to watch streaming by.

I’ve made plans for the next bit of the trip; Train tickets to Portland on Wednesday, and I’m going with a hotel for at least the first few days. This not  sleeping thing is getting less fun as time goes on, and it’s affecting how I can spend my day and what I can get done.

Once again, airport hotels have come to my rescue; For the cost of a travel pass and some time on a light rail train, I can save a hundred or so a night, which seems like a good trade to me.

I’ve also booked a tourist thing; The Boeing Factory tour.

With that done, I had an attack of the Get Out Of The Hostels, so I hopped over to Pikes Place Market,

then down to the ferry terminal, and took a trip to Bainbridge Island, mostly to get out on the water on a lovely day.

That said, it was also super loud at the hostel.
Cheering from the Football.
Fireworks from said football. Or they were shelling the field; It was hard to tell from the sound alone.
Flyovers from various aircraft.

You get the idea

Despite it being an unfamiliar system (rather than feeding a ticket through the machine, like various subways, you swipe the barcode past a scanner), I navigated it no worse than the locals.
Mostly because I watched them, and in particular the guy in front of me who screwed it up a few times.

The ferries are double-ended, and rather than docking & tying up, they do a “Controlled Crash”, where what holds the vessel in place is the engines. When they leave dock, the Captain walks to the other end, to the other bridge, and heads off.
There are some nice views from the bow, whichever end it happens to be at the time.

Also, it’s a good spot to re-enact that bit from Titanic, which I joined in with when another chap on the upper railing was encouraging folks to take the opportunity, because why the hell not?

From chatting with other folks standing on the uppest point of the current bow, the security present was … abnormal.
That said, it was September the 11th, which I suspect explains the Coast Guard escort.
And the armed¹ but very pleasant CG folks on board.

¹ – very armed.

It was also windy, once the ferry got up to speed.
The lady in purple here was kind enough to demonstrate while we were attempting to photograph another ferry.
also – Another photograph of a photographer!

The ferry I’m on looks like this, but, you know … closer.

And is named “Tacoma”.

Bainbridge Island loometh ‘pon yonder horizon.

Remember that sea of Seahawks gear?
Well, some of that sea washed up on the ferry.

Coming in for a controlled crash.

I’m not sure whether the game was still happening at this point, and there folks had slipped out early, or whether they were the first wave, who’d managed to make the 1640 crossing ahead of the crowd, or whether there just aren’t that many people heading for Bainbridge. The ferry wasn’t even close to full.

Back on land, I followed the signs and wander into the Downtown area.
Think “Small Town In Tourist Area” and you’ve got the idea; Lots of cafes, many places to by arts and crafts, …, Like Coromandel, or the Orewa waterfront.

Having been to Bainbridge Island & wandered around for a bit, I caught the ferry back again.

This time it’s the “Wenatchee”. I have no idea how to pronounce that.

There was a very visible moon, and Mt. Rainier was cooperating vis-à-vis visability, so I had a go at “Moon Over Mountain” as a photographic theme.

I’d be lying if I said it went well, though I did get another photographing photographers shot for the increasingly tedious collection.

Had a go from inside (which is why there are glowing panels in the sky) which came out a little better, and I’m pretty happy with “Moon over Ferry and Mountain”. (Pixel on CCD, 2016)

And to close out, some scenic.

I’ll admit it, I’m hazy on what EMP stands for in this context.

OK, I looked it up

It’s the Experience Music Project museum.

I didn’t sleep well last night, so it was something of a late start. I made up for it, however, by doing many things!

I got an ORCA card, to make public transport easier. Well, less fiddly.

I’m sick of walking everywhere, OK? Also, there are some spots I’d like to visit which seem unfeasible without public transit, mostly due to that whole harbour thing.

Armed with my new card (it’s a stored value thing, though being able to buy the card itself from a machine is a new one on me) I headed over to the Seattle Centre, which involved transferring to the Monorail.

Built, as I understand it, for the 1962 World’s Fair, it has the space-age look of the period. And it’s fun; The interior has either been lovingly restored or aged & maintained really well.

I’m trying to imagine what riding the thing would have been like in ’62, and I hope it was like catching a train to the future. You’d board this thing which was utterly unlike any other train, and arrive at the World’s Fair, near the foot of … A UFO landing structure?

There was something of a wait to go up the Space Needle, so I bought my ticket and killed some time at the EMP Museum.

They had a selection of things from the World of Wearable Arts show.

They had a Science Fiction gallery/exhibit, with a fun concept which I didn’t see until I was on my way out, as I’d come in via the Horror exhibit next door.

I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to see this uniform in an SF exhibit.

And then there was the Horror exhibit, talking about the why & the how of horror, specifically movies.

I could have spent a long time in this one; They had a bunch of video clips from interviews or conversations with Horror directors, talking about specific films in the genre, and … I wish I’d not been on such a tight timeframe.

And then there was the Space Needle.

There’s quite a view.

In fact, behind me, there’s this;

… which I think is Mt. Rainier, uncharacteristically visible & not hiding behind clouds. It’s in about the right spot, based on the map, but the crowds of folks in front of the interpretation screen things meant that I’m OK with not being 100% sure right now.

There’s not a lot more to say about the view, because cameras are a thing that exist, so I took photos. As you can see, it was a beautiful day for an observation deck 500+ feet up.

The railings were much lower once.

The elevators to get up there run on the outside of the structure, but I ended up at the back of the car both trips, so couldn’t get a photo or video worth the effort.

They had a little bar & a Starbucks up there, because where the hell isn’t there a Starbucks?

On the way back to the Monorail, there was this;

I’ve got nothing here, though I’d like to note that the prompt for the next episode of The Big Red Couch is “Banana Warriors From Dimension X”, so it’s topical. Or tropical. Or something.

More Monorail;

I wound up helping someone from Ottawa navigate the Seattle Link, which is the light rail running from the airport to the university, through the city. And through a shared transit tunnel for part of it’s route.

She had the look of transport system confusion, then asked me for advice/help, so I took her to the vend-o-tron, then to the correct platform. The platform bit was easy, as it was the same one I needed to be on.
There was a Night Market being set up as I left the hostel, and it was in full swing when I got back. Jason the roommate & I wandered around it for a while, and bought an unfeasible amount of Caramel Popcorn.

They had some form of dance-off happening, so you couldn’t really get away from the noise of that, though the only truly annoying bit was someone they had attempting to hype the dancing.

I hold the view that if a thing is impressive, or noteworthy, people will notice it, because they’re not idiots. Saying “Yeaaah” doesn’t make it worth noticing; Being noteworthy does.

This is my second hostel of the US trip, and the first Hostelling International hostel, so it’s the first time my HI card has actually gotten any use.

The level of luxury isn’t up to the Freehand Chicago, but I didn’t expect it to be.

They have a system that’s new on me, where there’s a poker chip with your bed ‘letter’, in the this case “A”, which you stick onto the bed frame to indicate that it’s taken. Given that they also have very specific signs about only using your bunk, and what to do if someone’s using your bunk, I’m going to guess they’ve had problems.

The lockers didn’t look it at first, but I can fit both of the Reds in there, with some wiggle room.

As seems to be my system, I did a lot of wandering around, which means that I have photographs of odd things.

The hostel is right beside the International District/Chinatown station, which is itself next to King Street station, where Amtrak are based, so transport’s pretty easy.
Also, this is what you walk through to get to the hostel from the station, though the photo’s taken from the hostel side, so you can see the station through the arch.

Most of the station is underground – there’s a tunnel under the world, through which the buses & light rail runs, which is kind of fun. It eventually goes above ground as you head towards the airport; Not sure what happens in the other direction.

There are also many pigeons, who appreciate a good Chinatown bakery.

And there are Dragons hanging around, keeping an eye on things.

Interior of what was once … Well, a railway station. The acoustics are awesome, in that every chair-scrape resonates through the whole space.
This isn’t King Street, that’s on the other side of the road; This is Union Station, formerly Oregon and Washington Station.
The trains don’t come here anymore, though the offices of the folks who run the Seattle Public Transport system are here.

My wanderings over a few days took me to Pike Place Market, on multiple days because I’d not realised how big it was & missed the bits under street level; There’s a multilevel assortment of stores linked by ramps and stairways, and the vibe is similar to those bookstores where there are more staircases than floors, and you’re not sure exactly how they all connect.
It’s pretty fun to wander around.

And I ‘found’, by wandering down Post Alley, the Gum Wall.

No, it’s not just an odd name.

The Green Tortoise was recommended to me by a roommate at the Freehand in Chicago, but the timing didn’t work out, sadly.
It’s right at the entrance, or at least one of the entrances, to the market.

And this I spotted on my wanderings, somewhere between 1st & 2nd avenues, I think.

One of the few things I really like about the Auckland CBD is that, sometimes, you can look down a street and see a bloody great ship at the end of the road.
Seattle has some of that happening too.

The day started with a Seattle tour, run by one of the folks who works at the hostel & who seems to be the person who organises a lot of the social stuff.

There was this tour, and the cookies & games thing another night, and an event recognising the recipients of a Hostelling International scholarship/grant to … go traveling. That last one, to be honest, was mostly popular because of the free beer & wine & food.

I ended up chatting with a couple of wandering educators; One at what I think was tertiary level, and one in the ESOL space.

Both interesting guys, though history about Seattle, and Redlining, and The Pine Box from one couldn’t hold a candle to the Illuminati/Reptile People/David Iche(?)/Hillary Clinton Is A Witch coming from the other guy.

The tour took in a really big market/grocery/bookstore near the hostel, including some of the history of the founder, who’d been forced out of business by being of Japanese ancestry during WW2, and being forced to move out of the area.
Then there was a museum of the Klondike Gold Rush, which was also a National Park inside a building.
This led through Pioneer Square, site of the more successful settlement¹ which became Seattle, via a bust of Chief Seattle/Si’ahl, then past a monument² to the starting of the Great Seattle Fire, to end up at Pike Place Market.

¹ This was covered in the boat trip too, and I suspect there’s detail missing, but the gist of the thing is that the original settlers hadn’t picked a good spot. After a while, Chief Seattle suggested that they move to somewhere less dumb, and they did.
Then named the city after him.
² It’s a representation of cabinetry & a pot of glue.
You just can’t make this stuff up.

From Pike Place, I ambled down & got onto a one-hour harbour cruise.
Of which this is apparently the only photo I took.

Well, it’s a harbour; I’m sure you know what those look like.

It does have Super-post-Panamax cranes, a cruise ship terminal they built out of hope which eventually paid off, and a whole lot of little parks thanks to a city councilwoman who was very keen on actual green space.
They also mentioned that, despite the reputation, Seattle isn’t even in the top 50 cities in the US for rainfall. It does, however, rain or drizzle almost every day.

The tour was fun, and they did another one from nearby Lake Union back to the waterfront via a set of locks, so I did that one too.

This one had floating houses in a profusion of colour schemes.
Also a tour narrator who was going with a riff of all of the folks we could see being part of the tour, who were required to wave back to us, and indeed were there just for that purpose.

Gas Works Park, which … was formerly a gas works.
That’s why it’s called that.

Brightly coloured tugboats, from the days when whoever got there first got the contract, so the companies would go with very distinctive colour schemes so that any ship owner who happened to like them could identify the boat & steer their way.

The Fremont Bridge, which opens 35 times a day on average.

Tiny Little Yellow Tugboat

And the locks.
It was one of the deckhand/bartender’s first time doing the ‘tying-up’ bit at the dock, so there was the scene of the Captain leaning over the rail to talk her through it, then an announcement & congratulations afterwards.

You can just see it out of this window; There’s a floating wall attached to the side of the lock.
The boat ties to that, and it keeps the same level, presumably so that you’re not having to adjust rope length all of the time.

I retreated from the burning assault of the Day-Star at this point.
For a cloudy city, it was damn sunny that day.

Yes, I did photograph the West Point Light, in part, because it looks like it’s the lighthouse from Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” music video.

And What Of It?

Misc scenic, filtered through glass and salt-spray.

A California Sea Lion.
Apparently the process by which they get onto the buoy is … not dignified … and takes a number of tries.

The possibly-visible globe there is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Globe, left behind when the newspaper of that name moved out of the building. It’s now an Official City Landmark.

So, summing up?
It was nice to spend a day, or at least chunks of it, out on the water.
Managed to not get sunburned by moving downstairs when it got too bright out there, so I’m calling that a win.