80 Days in America

Early in the morning I woke up at the parking place behind Starbucks, happy that no one else woke me up that night. I went inside my favorite coffeeplace for a while to have breakfast, doing some e-mails and updating the blog. Although It’s not my goal to make any advertisement for Starbucks, it’s worth to mention how much I feel home there. It’s just that these coffeeplaces look the like all over the world: a nice environment, most of the time some old jazz music and nice coffee, I really like it.

When I was ready with having breakfast and doing the online things, I headed to the centre of the city again to find out that parking is probably the main business of Seattle. Everywhere are parking places, one even more expensive than the other. Finally I found a parking place for 15 dollars which for that time was a good deal. Later I found out that there were some sportgames that morning and that was why parking places were even more expensive than normal. What I forgot to mention yesterday is that it’s quite hard to find your way with the car in a city that you don’t know, but after driving around in the centre for about an hour last night, I was surprised by how good I already knew the streets and the directions of each one-way avenue’s. It’s nice that most American cities are build up in squares, what makes it a lot easier to find your way.

I started the morning with the so-called ‘Underground tour‘ and learned a lot about the history of Seattle. The tourguide told about how the city came to excistence and that after the big fire in 1851 they just build new buildings upon the excisting ones. What they did is that they just covered the old streets and first floors of the old buildings and started building again at the second floor level. What left a lot of abandoned underground tunnels under the current city. In 1965 a guy called Bill Speidel started giving tours through these underground tunnels to protect the old buildings of being replaced with new buildings. He did a good job, because these days the old buildings are still there and so is the underground. It’s was a nice and interesting tour and I really enjoyed it.

After the underground tour I walked via the riverside to the famous market in Seattle where the fish sellers actually throw fish over the market. That was fun to see. Then I had another nice experience, I took the monorail through the city. Although it was short ride, it was really cool to do. I don’t know any other city that has a monorail. I did some more sightseeing and in the end of the afternoon I decided to leave the city again, because there was another interesting place at my agenda: Mount St. Helens.

Mount St. Helens is as far as I know the last vulcano that erupted in the United States. These days it’s a big abandoned mountain without a peak. It was a quite long, but very nice drive to the mountain where I watched the sunset. At that moment I suddenly realized that I have probably lost the tripod of my camera yesterday at the waterfalls. It must have been the excitement or the exhaustion at the waterfalls that at some point I forgot my favorite tool. First I was really disappointed, because it’s a valuable tool, but then I choose not to let my joy be stolen from me too. I put on some good music at the radio and decided not to be sad about this. Tomorrow I’ll drive back to the waterfalls in the hope to find the tripod back and else I can always try my travel insurance.

At the end of the evening I parked again next to the Applebees where I was two days ago, sadly knowing that the pianoplayer wouldn’t be here again tonight, but again I enjoyed some reasonable food and it was good to stay at a place where I was before. Another nice thing of this parking place was that there were two red boxes where you can rent movies for about a dollar a night, so I enjoyed a movie again in my home cinema in the back of my car. Unlike all the other days it took me really long to fall in sleep, probably to many impressions today. Tomorrow I expect to have a long and beautiful ride again.