2022 Destination Recaps: Seattle Part 1
9 intense weeks of sun, water, mountains, visitors, and traffic
Seattle was the destination we had been planning toward and looking forward to all year. Our general guide for choosing destinations from January to June was
1) good weather during the month we’d be there
2) great nature destinations nearby
3a) 4-12 hours drive away from the previous destination and
3b) in the direction of Seattle.
Jen started working at REI in October 2021, and had been hearing ever since how amazing Seattle was in the summer. REI had recently gone remote during the pandemic but was headquartered in Seattle, meaning most of her coworkers were still there. As lovers of the ocean and mountains and Asian food, our hopes were sky high for Seattle, enough to book 9 weeks there instead of our usual 5.
At first, we were disappointed. Our AirBnb was in an outrageously hilly neighborhood and the major thoroughfare into it was under construction. Combine that with the poor signage, traffic, and third-world style driving Seattle is known for, and we tended to be in a sour mood whenever we left the house because of the experience of getting around by car. The city eventually grew on us - it has so, so much to offer and we chose a tough neighborhood for driving that also just happened to be under construction, but the difficulty of getting around continued to put a damper on most of our experiences in and around Seattle.
Even more than traffic, the most salient experience of our time in Seattle was visitors. We had 4 sets of visitors filling 5 of our 9 weeks, leaving 2 weekends and some odds and ends free between guests and and wedding/bachelorette travel. We absolutely loved having visitors, and seeing the city repeatedly through fresh eyes is whatever really redeemed it to us, but our habit of constantly scheming about weekend plans and putting together itineraries instead of having any normal hobbies or ways to blow off steam was taken to a totally new level this summer.
Anyway, enough of my curmudgeoning about an awesome summer: you want to hear about travels and see some pictures, and luckily, our first guest was down for camping/hiking and a great photographer. Our friend Bryce from Cincinnati had seen Seattle before but had never been camping and is always down to try new things, so we convinced him to spend most of his visit hours away from Seattle sleeping on the ground instead of the perfectly nice city and couch he was planning on.
We visited Olympic National Park, an enormous mountain range that took up most of the peninsula at the northwest tip of the continental US. Entrances and trailheads are scattered around the perimeter of the range, so that the farthest trails were as far from the nearest ones as the nearest were to Seattle. We settled for a cluster on the north end of the park: Hurricane Ridge and Lake Crescent, with an overnight at a hipcamp in Port Angeles in between.
The view from just the visitors center at Hurricane Ridge was mind blowing, but the hike itself I chose was one of my worst picks. Luckily Bryce is in excellent shape and had a great attitude, so we persevered through tough terrain to some great views. We took it easy the next day at Lake Crescent, but still got some great views.
A few days after Bryce left, my family came to visit for 10 days, which I had been looking forward to since I’d last seen them in Montreal. I took the time off work, which proved for the best because it forced me to stop being a bottleneck and properly document everything that needed done so my team could handle it while I was away.
The first order of business was actually another drive to Canada: we stayed a few days in Vancouver, a city we had all been wanting to see. Vancouver was everything Jen and I were hoping Seattle would be: equally diverse and temperate, but somehow both more affordable and denser with better transit options. We fell in love with the city, enough to bump it to the top of our settle-down list if it wouldn’t mean the hassle to living and working in a different country.
We did all the touristy must-dos: walked around Stanley Park, took a gondola up Grouse Mountain to see the bears, took a water taxi to Granville Island, watched the sea planes, rode in a sea plane, and ate lots of excellent food. We stayed in a beautiful neighborhood, denser than the typical American Western neighborhood with plenty of duplexes and four-plexes, but no lack of gardens or character to show for it, walkable to one of the main restaurant strips in town. A short bus ride away was downtown, full of Vancouver’s famous greenish glass high rises that made the city feel dense but not overbearing, and interspersed with plenty of greenery. We would have loved more time there, but Seattle was calling, so we drove back to show the city we kinda knew to my family.
In Seattle, we also did the touristy things, but one of the nice things about Seattle is that there isn’t much that is exclusively touristy, but plenty of great ways to spend a day off that are also things locals do. We wandered Pike Place Market and the Space Needle and took an underground history tour of Pioneer Square, but from there were free to treat Seattle like locals and picnic at Gas Works, walk the Ballard Locks and grab Happy Hour in Adams, and hike around Discovery Park, Bainbridge Island, and Alki Beach. It was very nice filling the itinerary with things I wanted to do myself, namely walking around beautiful spaces that were usually near water.
As always, saying goodbye was sad, especially since I won’t see them again until the holidays and because it meant I had to go back to work. But we knew there were plenty more adventures in store for us in the rest of our time in Seattle.