We have just come home from a delightful family vacation in the lush green and ever so cool Pacific Northwest. Originally we had thought that it would be the year to bask in the sun in Italy, but the planning got crazy and complicated and the “free” airline tickets were anything but bargains. We pondered the many options available to us, and finally arrived at Seattle, a place the children and I had never visited but that my husband had been to a few times, briefly, for business. We decided that our celebratory, milestone holiday would be spent west of the Mississippi – the first time for the four of us.
The Tall One was finished with college, and the Pouting Pescatarian has just one more course to go before she is released upon the universe, and the summer yawned before us. Didn’t Memorial Day sneak up on us this year? In my head it is May 31, not May 26. But I was not consulted.
Two years ago Best Beloved and I visited London over Memorial Day. The Queen needed us to come help her celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, and what a swell party that was. We enjoyed food and drink and walking and cool, sunshiny weather. Almost exactly what we found in Seattle. There was a little less pomp this year, but still some great beers. And on this trip I packed sneakers so I did not get awful blisters as I ran around town. Although no one warned me about the hills in Seattle! This was a detail never addressed on Grey’s Anatomy.
As part of our otherwise thorough research about Seattle we watched Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, and were delighted when we stumbled into the Athenian restaurant (https://athenianinn.com/) in Pike Place Market, and had an enormous breakfast there on our first morning west of the Mississippi. A scene in the movie was filmed in the Athenian, and there are two red plastic plaques fastened to the lunch counter that mark where Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner sat. We opted for an upstairs water view, however. We could see across squat buildings to the waterfront ferris wheel, The Seattle Great Wheel, Elliott Bay, the Seattle Aquarium and Bainbridge Island. This was where we watched the Tall One tuck into the first of many breakfast extravaganzas. Not that any one of us was a breakfast slouch – we had flown across the country overnight with just a bag of mustard pretzels served to us by the airline. Sustenance was called for! Watch this serious escalation in meal size:
I ordered a toasted bagel with cream cheese, bacon and a Diet Coke.
The Pouting Pescatarian chose the relatively modest Veggie Scramble with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, peppers, spinach and Swiss cheese with a glass of orange juice and a coffee.
Best Beloved asked for Homemade Corned Beef Hash with two poached eggs, hash browns and toast, with a cup of coffee.
Drumroll, please: The Tall One had the Three Meat Omelet (bacon, sausage and ham) with cheese, a half stack of hotcakes and a generous side of hash browns. Coffee with cream and sugar. Amazing.
Restored and revived we wandered down the stairs, photographed the site where Tom Hanks stood briefly in 1993, and took a quick peek at the Pike Place Market. (We would return in a few days to explore the famous halls of frenzied and aromatic activity.) Then we conquered the most vertiginous hill I have walked up since I visited San Francisco in 1989, which was when I was recovering from surgery. Seattle was almost as painful twenty-five years later. Up the Pike Street hill we trotted, ogling sights and sounds, albeit with me trailing way behind the pack, to get our rental car. We tooled downhill to the hotel to gather up our luggage, and then we were off to catch a car ferry in Anacortes, to our Friday Harbor destination on San Juan Island. We stopped at a market in Anacortes for sandwiches to tide us over on our journey and to stock up on some bare essentials for the rental house. Amazingly we squeezed oodles of grocery bags, and wine bottles, and a cooler into the car amid the welter of bags and backpacks, and drove off to join the line for the ferry.
We munched our sandwiches as we sat in the queue for more than two hours, waiting for the ferry, which we barely made. The car that was 10 cars behind us didn’t make the 2:40 with us. They had to wait until the 4:30 ferry. Luckily, for once, we were a little early. It was Memorial Day Weekend Thursday, and we were all anxious to dive into summer. We stood shivering in the cool breezes on deck and watched as ferries, sailboats, sea gulls, and tree-covered islands streamed past, until we arrived in Friday Harbor; a colorful working harbor, with pleasure boats, tour boats and fishing vessels and schools of tourists and townsfolk.
After we were disgorged we followed circuitous directions through the small town to our house, which was an ingenious combination of two smaller houses, with a wisteria-covered pergola, flaming fuchsia rhododendron bushes and drifts of pink peonies. An eagle flew overhead, and we could see the snow-covered Mt. Baker across the still water. Breakfast in Seattle had been forgotten. It was time to start cooking dinner.
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.”
― A.A. Milne
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