I remember having an ice storm in Colorado sometime around 1984 (I was 5 or 6) which was not early this bad, but I haven’t experienced a storm like that since then. We had cattle at the time and my dad and I had to go out and knock all of the ice off of the electric fences to keep them from getting out as well as busted holes in iced over water tanks so that the cattle would have something to drink. Consequently that was the first time I remember driving– I had to steer my dad’s Bronco while he knocked the ice off with a shovel on the electric fence. Man, has life changed since then…

As for myself, I seem to end-up in a lot of old Kerouac haunts for whatever reason.

The first day was mostly a travel day– we got into Seattle in the afternoon, avoided the Jewish Center shootings which were only a few blocks away from us, and headed down to the Pike Place Market but didn’t stay too long. We were very hungry and ended-up grabbing some dinner and beers at the Pike Place Pub– I ended-up having a Pub burger which was honestly not that great, and Lindsey had some sort of chicken pizza which was delicious. Before heading back to the hotel for the evening, we took a water taxi to Bremerton Island and back just to get out in Elliot Bay and see the skyline of Seattle.

On Saturday, we headed down to check-out Pike Place Market again and took some time to stroll through and check-out more stuff there. From there we headed to the Ivar’s Fish Bar for some cheap seafood eats and to feed the gulls. On a side note, it was interesting that one of the few places around Seattle to see Seagulls was at Ivar’s. After eating at Ivar’s, we took a ferry to Bainbridge Island. We mostly browsed around on Bainbridge Island for a few hours, then headed back to Seattle. We didn’t plan ahead very well for an evening meal and had to settle for a late dinner at Ill Fornaio, which was probably the worst meal of the trip. For spending about $30 a piece, the food was terrible, and the service was even worse.

Sunday we went to check-out the Ballard Locks, which apparently are the second busiest locks in the US. I think the coolest part of the locks is the Salmon ladder. We were there during the peak of Sockeye Salmon season, so there were swarms of them swimming up the ladder to Lake Washington to spawn and die. After visiting the Locks, we walked down the street to visit Archie McPhee’s. A small part of the loads of stuff they have in there is not on their website, and I have NO idea why it’s even there. Examples include taxi fare boxes, welding gloves, and various sizes of O rings.

Sunday evening we went to the waterfront and dined at Typhoon!, a local Thai restaurant chain which had many good reviews. I had the Balinese Pork Tenderloin with a Sapporo, and Lindsey had the Five-Spice Crispy Duck. Both meals were perfect, and I’d go back to Seattle again just to eat there.

Monday we headed to the Museum of Flight to check-out an impressive display of aircraft. Unfortunately I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t get to see as much of the museum as I would have liked, but I got to check-out a lot of jets in person that I’ve always wanted to see– a Concorde, F-14, the first Air Force One, and an SR-71. I also got a chance to sit in the cockpit of an F/A 18 Hornet, and an SR-71 Blackbird. Cool stuff! From the museum we headed to the Seattle Aquarium which was pretty cool, and much better than the crappy restaurant / tourist trap Denver Aquarium. I think my favorite part was watching the various types of Otters swim and play. From there we proceeded to The Fisherman’s for a typical tourist desire– a seafood dinner on the pier overlooking Elliot Bay. I had some delicious fresh Salmon, though I doubt this would be a place I’d regularly visit.

On Tuesday, we did a fairly disapointing tour of the Boeing factory. It basically consisted of getting on a bus, being driven to the HUGE building that they assemble 747’s, 767’s, 777’s, and soon 787’s in, going up to an overlook for 10-15 minutes, and then getting bussed back to where we started. That was literally it. It was cool I suppose, but there was probably a better use of time and money, especially considering that no photos were allowed. Once we got back from the tour, we headed up further into Capitol Hill to grab some Dick’s Burgers and walk around a bit. Dick’s is probably my new fast food burger favorite– while they don’t have the “secret” menu like In-N-Out, their burgers and shakes are simply delicious. Capitol Hill in Seattle is very similar to Capitol Hill in Denver– lots of hipsters who need a hug, a shower, and drug rehab / therapy, though I didn’t see any crack dealers. From Capitol Hill, we went back and chilled-out in the hotel for a bit.

Tuesday evening we headed-out to West Seattle for Sushi at Mashiko. Notice the URL for Mashiko is sushiwhore.com– awesome! I started off my meal with a bowl of the Miso vegetable soup, then split Charlie’s Angels Roll, Temptation Island Roll, The Red Violin Roll, and a Bowler Roller roll with Lindsey, and washed it down with my favorite Sushi beer, Sapporo. All of the rolls and soup were delicious, and I’ll definately go back again.

Wednesday was basically a travel day. We checked-out of the hotel, grabbed some delicious sandwiches from the Baguette Box (owned by the same guy who owns Typhoon!), and headed to the airport via the Gray Line Airporter to fly back to Denver.

What is Seattle like compared to Denver? I’d say they have a lot in common– both are the most populous areas of the state surrounded by mostly small cities and towns, they are similar in size (the population of Seattle proper is around 500,000, and the Seattle metro area is 3 million). I like the climate in Seattle better than Denver– it stays around the same temperature year round (60’s-70’s), and doesn’t rain nearly as much as it has a reputation for. It seems that typically the summer mornings are overcast, then the clouds are mostly burned away by the afternoon. Seattle doesn’t have nearly the suburban sprawl problems that Denver has, though the traffic is probably just as bad because of all of the water they have to go around/over. They are currently building out a light rail system, and the bus system itself is excellent. Other than a tour and transportation to and from the airport, we pretty much used the bus system. A couple of times we did take a Taxi to get from place to place downtown, but mostly a $5 fare was worth not having to climb from the waterfront back to our hotel after a long day on our feet. Denver has great restaurants, but it seems like Seattle has more great restaurants to choose from. Denver people are usually pretty friendly, but literally everyone there were really nice, and not in a “please leave me alone” overbearing Southern nice way. Speaking of Southerners, I only encountered one Texan/Southern/White Trash couple there (I really can’t stand, racist, sexist, white trash, homophobic, uneducated rednecks). Who else would wear a shirt that looked like a big Texas flag? Sheesh.

Because of the influences of successful tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, there seem to be a lot more tech jobs in Seattle, as well as money being poured into projects like The Experience Music Project by people like Paul Allen. The downtown area is also more active– after 6 PM on the weekdays in Denver, downtown is pretty dead aside from lodo. I couldn’t tell you which is more bike friendly between Denver and Seattle– some of the hills are so steep there I’d only want to ride one way and then bus back the other way. I didn’t see many people attempting the hill climbs, but there were a few. Bainbridge Island seemed like the place for more flat landed bike riding. It did seem relatively dog friendly– we saw tons of people with dogs, and some people even took them on the ferry, etc.

In short, I’m pretty sold on Seattle and think I’d probably like living there more than Denver– perhaps I’ll even move there someday. The metro area is just a bit bigger than Denver with more things to do and in general offers all of the amenities of a bigger city without all of the problems of a bigger city.

I got home at about 1 and was totally exhausted.. I just might be getting too old for this shit. :O

Friday it took a bit for us to get going. I wasn’t even able to get onto a major highway before my iPod started freaking-out, and so we had to make the trip virtually musicless (talk about a soul killer… ). I suspect the disk is corrupted somehow, but I haven’t been quite motivated to spend some time on fixing it yet. Hopefully I won’t have to send it to Apple.. argh. After many boring hours of driving and much cleaning of the windshield because of bugs, we arrived in KC at about 12:30 AM local time early Saturday morning.

On Saturday morning we woke-up at a pretty reasonable hour and headed over to our friends house for a pre-wedding breakfast with friends, and then went back downtown where our hotel was at to check out the few Kansas City sights including the Liberty Memorial and Union Station to burn some time until the 5:30 PM wedding. Downtown KC actually reminds me a lot of Downtown Denver in the 80’s before all of the redevelopment happened. Seems like it has a lot of potential, but no one really seems to live downtown, and there are a lot of cool abandoned buildings. From a quick tour of a few things downtown, we headed to the wedding and essentially spent the evening at the reception. I did end-up downloading some music to the laptop before heading to bed just in case we came across some CD blanks somewhere to have music for the car.

Sunday we slept in a bit and grabbed some amazing BBQ at Arthur Bryant’s on the way out of town once it had opened. The sandwich in the picture with this entry is my meal– a combination pork and beef sandwich which contained 6 slices of Wonder Bread, a lb of meat, some heavily larded french fries, pickles, and a large Coke, and this is pretty much the standard meal for the place. I was able to get down all of the sandwich sans about 3 pieces of bread and maybe one third of the fries.

During a fuel stop we stumbled across some CD-R’s, so I had Garrett burn me few CD’s while back on the road. I was actually surprised the laptop would burn CD’s in a moving car while on battery power for some reason, but I guess I’m just a geek that way. We finally got into Denver at around 10:30 PM. Unfortunately I still had to take Garrett home to Ft. Collins and also pick-up my dog, and as luck would have it, there was a crazy traffic jam in North Denver for some construction that took forever to get through. I finally got back home at around 1:30 AM, and that’s pretty much it I guess.

I think my photos from the trip tell the story a little better, but mostly it was just a quick but busy road trip to attend a friends’ wedding. Oh, and thanks yet again to Valentine One for keeping me from getting any speeding tickets while making Kansas blur by *knock on wood*.

Seems like I’ve been on a bit of a streak for seeing live shows, though I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to post about them. In early March I saw the live version of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party which was as good as expected. It was very laid-back, Dave had plenty of new stuff to talk about (this was the second time I’ve seen him live), and Erykah Badu was /amazing/. I think she needs to have my babies– what a beautiful, soulful woman. I’d love to see her do a full concert and plan on trying to catch her the next time she’s in town.

In mid-March I went to see P.O.S. at the Larimer Lounge. I originally saw P.O.S. perform as one of the openers for Atmosphere and was /very/ impressed… in fact I think it’s the first time I’ve ever bought a CD at a concert, and I’ve seen quite a lot of shows over the years. P.O.S. is basically a punk artist turned indie hip-hop, and both his production and lyrics are pretty amazing. I’m sure if he got much mainstream exposure his material would be quite a bit more popular.

It was my first time at the Larimer Lounge (I was supposed to see Wesley Willis there, but unfortunately he passed away before that concert happened) which was kind of interesting. Basically the front area is a small bar where you can drink, and a very small and short area where the stage is at. You can’t take drinks out of the bar, and I think the place holds around 335 people. Kind of interesting, and I’m sure I’ll end-up going back (Murs was there recently, but I was sick that day).

On St. Patricks Day I saw Dave Attell at Comedy Works. We ended-up with seats maybe 3-4 rows back and had a blast. Dave was on fire and brought-out a lot of material which even seemed risque for him. I’m paraphrasing here, but one of my favorite lines from the evening was something along the lines of:

Oh yeah, I love children, I message them on the internet all the time. “Hey Sarah, do you have a webcam?”

April didn’t really present itself with many concerts, though I did go see The Second City: Red Scare and a Rockies game as well. Red Scare was great– admittedly I’m not necessarily someone who frequents the theatre, but this production was right-up my alley. According to my friend Molly who hooked me up with free tickets (thanks!), I was within the target demographic for the show; young, politically aware, and someone who normally doesn’t go to the theatre. Basically it’s a biting improv performance which covers many current political and social issues such as race, politics, Dubya, the environment, sex, etc, all without holding any punches. I was pretty floored that they actually cursed quite a bit (who doesn’t enjoy a f-bomb?), and I had a great time. It’s only running through the 21st of this month, and I highly recommend checking it out if you’re not easily offended and have an active interest in what’s going on in the world.

The only other show on the horizon that I have tickets for is The Roots at the Fox Theater. Should be a good time. Oh, I guess I did also check-out Body Worlds 2 a couple of weeks back.

My Operating Systems Theory class also started picking-up in April, and I had a great time learning about the initmate internal details about FreeBSD, threading, locking, paging, process scheduling, pooling, and all of the other fun geeky stuff that goes with the intimate details of an Operating System. Unfortunately in the middle of my research paper about FreeBSD I got pretty sick for a couple of weeks and am just now starting to tread water again. My last couple of classes have been soul killers, so I decided to take the next 8 weeks off from school to recharge and take care of some things which have slipped during me being busy with school.

On a related note, I officially scheduled my Summer vacation today for the first week of August. I’ll be heading to the Pacific Northwest with Lindsey to visit Seattle, Portland, and perhaps Vancouver. So far the agenda is to catch a Portland Beavers game (an AAA affiliate of the San Diego Padres), where my High School friend and former neighbor Mike Thompson from High School is a starting pitcher, visiting Archie McPhee, and enjoying the awesome hotel we’re staying at in Seattle (thanks to Lindsey’s work discounts), but I’m sure more will be on the plate before we leave.

I’ll also be heading to Kansas City in a few weeks for a wedding which should be a blast. I’ll be doing a road trip there with my best friend from High School for another good friend’s wedding. I need to remember to find at least one or two BBQ places to try and eat at while I’m there…

Whew, this ended-up being a much longer post than I anticipated.

I ended-up taking a bit over 400 pictures while I was there.. like holy shit and stuff. I went through them this evening and selected about 100 from that group for you peeps to look at. You can view the pictures from my trip here.

Andrea drove to the airport rather than taking the train, so I have experienced the Autobahn already. Tons and tons of BMW’s, Audi’s, and Mercedes, but I’ve only seen a couple of Porsches so far. She had to go back to work for the afternoon, so I’m going to hop in the shower in a bit, and try not to fall asleep so that I can adjust to the local timezone. I don’t feel like I have jet lag that bad, but I bet by 8-9 PM, I’ll crash hard. No big plans for today really other than starting to make some plans for the next week here this evening. Given the typical European 35 hour work week, Andrea will be off tomorrow afternoon which starts her week long vacation while I’m here.

If I don’t feel like I’m going to pass-out after my shower, I think I’ll go stroll around the town a bit. I’m staying in Neustadt, which is a small town of around 50,000 people in Southern Germany. The local economy seems to be mostly supported by the wineries in the region, and its quite beautiful here. Andrea’s apartment is pretty cool as well, and has some nice views of the area from the balcony. I’ll be sure to take plenty of pictures as I have around 420 pictures at my disposal since I picked-up a second 256 MB Compact Flash card for my digital camera this past weekend. I won’t be able to post any of them until I am home, though.

I’m still sort of adjusting to being here, mostly by nature of having to pinch myself that I finally find myself in Europe. Its one of those things I’ve looked forward to for years and years, and finally its happened. It will probably take a couple of days for it to sink in that I’m really here, and am not in a movie or something. And yes, I know I’m strange, but thanks for noticing.

Anyhow, typing on this German keyboard sucks because the keys are all moved around, so don’t expect any long, personal e-mails from me, nor should you expect my entries to be error free. I’m mostly documenting the trip for myself so I can go back later in the future and read about it. That’s it for now!