{"id":1822,"date":"2016-09-14T04:55:05","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T03:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=1822"},"modified":"2016-09-15T05:33:26","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T04:33:26","slug":"going-deeper-underground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=1822","title":{"rendered":"Going Deeper Underground"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last full day in Seattle, and the thing I had <\/b>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) <\/i>demonstrated <\/i>that <\/i>their\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/p>\n

My first Tourist Thing was the\u00a0Klondike Gold Rush<\/a> National Historical Park, Seattle Unit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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, …
\nYou get the idea.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> them, on the other hand, made out like bandits.
\nSeattle 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”<\/em><\/p>\n

In an odd way, the National Park\u00a0in<\/strong> a building made me remember, fondly, some of the DOC area & field offices, and the various historical protection rangers who worked in them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Out in Occidental\u00a0Square<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

Note yet another photograph of a photographer.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Tourist thing number two was Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Think an irreverent look at Seattle history where the tour guide is doing stand-up comedy, and you’ve got the idea.
\nI 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.<\/p>\n

Things we learned about included;<\/p>\n