Hello Seattle

Hey, everyone. I'm on a limited time frame here since the Seattle Pulic Library does not see it fit to give out-of-towners access to the Internet for more than 30 minutes. I'll provide as many details as I can about the last couple of days; pictures will have to wait though. Don't worry, I'm in the city for another two days at least so I still have lots of things to photograph anyway.

So, on Monday, I left Libby, MT and rode back to Whitefish. I made it back with lots of time to spare so I went to my host's house from the day before to shower and lollygag. Richard and Lorinda, my hosts, were so much fun! It saddened me to have to leave them, but the train had arrived so I left.

This was my first experience riding on a train beyond all the subways I rode when my family lived in New York when I was a kid. Since the train arrived at 10 PM, I drifted off to sleep almost immediately and woke up (as always) at 6 AM the next morning. It was a pretty mudane ride with no particularly awesome views, but still a lot of fun.

We arrived in Seattle at around 10 AM. It was overwhelming. To go from a Whitefish, MT, where I could probably leave my bike unlocked in public for days and nothing would happen, to a city this large was an intense change. The first thing I noticed is that there are a lot of homeless people that talk to themselves here. It makes me feel more comfortable if I pretend they all have bluetooth headsets on.

So I bought some cereal and milk and starting eating it in Occidental Park when fortune shone her bright smile on me again. A girl named Sydney, who's solo backpacking from her home in California along the coast, started chatting with me about bike touring. We talked a lot about my ride and about her adventure and then exchanged phone numbers and planned to meet for dinner and a night out with the friends she was staying with. I hadn't even seen a club in the last 1800 miles of traveling so I was definitely ready for some fun.

After that, I headed over to my Warmshowers host to meet him and drop off some stuff. His name's Brad. He's married and has the two cutest kids on the planet. That statement is not up for debate. Brad told me he teaches music at Lakeside Academy in Seattle. That name was incredibly familiar when he said it and I realized it was because, last week, I was at the library in Polson, MT reading about how Bill Gates came to be so successful and the book mentioned that he went to Lakeside. It turns out that Brad has chatted with Bill Gates Sr. multiple times and has gone to the same events as Bill Gates Jr. How cool is that!

Afterward, I lollygagged in the city for a while. Pike Place Market is a gigantic public market (the oldest continuously operating one in the world, apparently) and so I was there for a while and then just roamed the surrounding areas.

I met up with Sydney and her friends Julia and Jen for dinner and a night out. Both of them are awesome as well. Jen has degrees from Columbia and Stanford in athropology and, if you go to imdb.com today, Julia designed the ad and layout for Storage Wars. The number of cool people I'm meeting is insane.

I'm off now to hang out some more and meet other people. I'm thinking of checking out the University of Washington today and getting some Indian food. I miss my parent's cooking.

Peace out.

Shamwow