Seattle

I’m sitting in the terminally chic lobby of the W Hotel in Seattle, having spent the entire day yesterday in my hotel room.  It’s somehow incredibly decadent to stay in bed and order room service meals and watch television and read trashy detective books all day long.  It did pour rain pretty much the entire day yesterday, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to stay in bed.  This morning I felt rested and ready to hit the town.  I drank the Starbucks latte that Brad kindly brought to me unprompted after his morning run and took a shower and got dressed and actually left the room and the hotel and walked around for an hour and a half getting some sense of the city.  It’s sunny and breezy here today, and I covered much of the downtown area on foot.  I like cities:  the apparent purposefulness of people walking quickly, the availability of bookstores and coffee (especially here in Seattle!) and shiny new things in storefront windows.  Seattle is nicely ethnically varied and laid out in a fairly tidy grid pattern and all the steep hills raise the heart rate during a casual stroll.  It’s strange to me that Pike’s Place Market, which is probably the most touristy part of town, is also home to a large concentration of adult movie theaters and Girls Girls Girls places.  Or maybe XXX entertainment action is why people travel to Seattle??  The Rem Koolhaas designed public library is just around the corner from our hotel.  I’ve walked past it a couple of times, but am saving going inside to share with Brad, who is mostly excited about checking out the bathrooms.

I suppose that we’re technically on our way to Alaska.  We left Boulder yesterday, but I’m here for a week while Brad does board meetings and a Microsoft thing and a Gnomedex conference (whatever that is — something for geeks, I think) and then he’s making a quick trip to Boston.  It’s good to do a cross-continent 2 day trip on red-eye flights; really makes you appreciate sleeping in a bed again?  So I’m going to have plenty of time to enjoy Seattle and being in an urban environment before we get to Homer for the rest of the summer.