Seattle Afternoon

How not to find your way home in Seattle...

There was a neat house across the street and I kept thinking, I should take a picture of that house, but I wanted to capture shots of the boats on the water. But when all you have to take pictures with anyway is a cell phone, you have to really use your imagination. I wasn't sure what the house would look like on a cell phone. In fact, the images on this site, poor as they may be, look much better than they did on the cell phone.

I walked up and down the little park, looking for a good vantage spot to grab an exciting picture of the boats out on the water. Maybe if I had had a true camera the pictures would have turned out better. I increased the resolution on my cell phone to maximum and started snapping away.

Of course, they just look like indecipherable dots unless you resize them and then they look like blurry blotches. So, feeling like I'd done enough vista photography, I returned to my car and drove back toward downtown. I figured I had better start retracing my steps before I got totally and completely lost. Besides, the recruiter called me and offered to show me around Seattle. That sounded like a plan. I just had to be back at the hotel by 4:30, and it was almost 3:00 PM. It would take that long just to find the valet station....

The lady currently in my life loves fall colors. I couldn't help but notice all the trees with orange-red leaves. I took several pictures as I was drivintg through the city, but none of them really turned out well. I dutifully sent all of them to her, but this one looked like the best shot. I didn't realize until later that I had managed to take a picture of the sun through the car's windshield. I've done what I can to enhance the picture of the tree, but it doesn't even begin to do justice to the blaze of colors that lined the streets for me that day.

Getting to the vicinity of the hotel was no problem. I came within 2 blocks of the structure several times. Many times, in fact. But my carefully planned route ran afoul of the Seattle traffic schedule. I began encountering signs that said things like, "No turns 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM". Meanwhile, text messages demanding more pictures kept flowing to my phone.

At one point, I decided to just drive down to the waterfront to see if there was a way around the "No Entry" zone. I found myself in a market where pedestrians looked at me like I was crazy. I may have been frothing at the mouth by this point, fruitlessly sharing my personal philosophy of how city streets should be designed with no one in particular. A few right turns and a couple of steep hills later, I was right back where I started...in the middle of traffic and totally clueless about how to make my way over 2 streets.

As the 92nd coffee house I'd passed in Seattle receded in my side mirror, I thought to myself, maybe I'm on the wrong side. So I naively turned the car around and drove about 3 blocks past the hotel. I then began snaking my way back toward the south, gradually and almost gracefully moving toward the waterfront. This time, I came within a block of the building before finding myself going the wrong way, but that was all I needed. By 3:30 PM I had safely returned the keys to the hotel valet. I was done driving for the day.

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