I wish I could begin to describe to you the depths of my weariness. I have finally realized that I am now 40. Ouch. Here was my schedule today:
5:30 a.m. – wake up and get ready to catch flight
6:30 a.m. – catch hotel shuttle to airport
7:00 a.m. – check baggage and battle with the supposedly self-serve automated machine that won’t scan my printed boarding passes. Give up and go to see the girl at the ticket counter to figure out how to get processed. She looks at me like I’m stupid as I’m the ONLY person having trouble.
7:15 a.m. – grab a quick breakfast of muffins and juice with the girls (or monsters or whatever it was they got). Pay 2.00 for a crappy croissant and wish I’d saved my money.
7:30 a.m. – Go through security check point. This was quite interested. The guy who played in Splash that threw the water on the mermaid was checking us out. He was cracking me up. He held my license up and stared at me for about five minutes before saying, “You changed your hair.” Yeah. People do that sometimes. It’s still brown and I’m still fat, so I think I’m recognizable. He then grills the girls on their birthdays and ages. It was comical, but you know he was pleasant through it all and I think if we had a few more like him that we might be a lot safer.
7:50 a.m. – Cram onto a tiny little commuter plane. Did I really sign up for this? My thirteen year old is freaking out because she is scared to fly, but isn’t being loud about it.
8:15 a.m. – Plane takes off, daughter makes my arm go numb she is squeezing it so hard. She is that strange, in between age where she hates me but needs me, so she intermittently buries her head in my shoulder but then yells at me to stop patting her like a baby.
Three hours of pure torture ensue as she gets into my space and wears me down.
9:15 a.m.-ish (salt lake time) – One of my Lori moments happens and we sit at the wrong gate for about 30 minutes before I realize they’ve moved our gate to a different spot and we have to go to the other end of the airport to catch our connecting flight. We made it, but had to hurry. None of us really wanted to get on another plane at this point. We were getting very tired. We even toyed with the idea of staying in Salt Lake, but we didn’t mean it.
12:30 (Seattle time) – At this point we’d been on planes for 5 hours plus a few more hours waiting around for planes. Tired doesn’t begin to describe it. We were living on excitement of being in a new place. The baggage took forever, but Dollar Rent A Car was smooth. The only thing I didn’t like was that they didn’t have the Focus I had booked (trying to support hubby’s work and American auto makers) and gave us a Hyundai instead. The car is okay, but it doesn’t run nearly as well as my Focus. It’s cute and close to what I’m used to driving though. Plus, it will get good gas mileage for our trip to Forks and back. The girl did try to talk me into upsizing to an SUV hybrid for more money. I resisted the urge. I can’t handle a big ole car anyway.
1:30 ish, we head for Pike’s Place Market and right off the bat MapQuest gets me lost. Why, oh why didn’t I bring my husband’s GPS? Not that she is much better. I have named his GPS Carrie, because she apparently hates anyone but my husband and has tried to kill me several times by telling me to turn left NOW when turning left would have taken me off a mountain or into a building. Yikes! After asking several people, we find it.
2:30 – Pike’s Place Market is absolutely amazing. I wish we had something like this near us. We do have Indy’s City Market, but it isn’t nearly as alive and interesting. There were street performers and many more shops. Me and the girls both loved this stop on our itinerary. In fact, we left and then turned around and went back because my daughter wanted more pics and we found a drug store where we could buy batteries. Since she is a budding photographer/writer, I decided to indulge her whim. Both the girls wanted to spend more time there anyway.
4:00 – We head to the Space Needle. For once we were given good directions because I pulled over to the pull up at a fancy schmancy hotel, rolled my window down and asked the bell hop. He was very nice and explained land marks and road names and I found the Space Needle easily. Whooot! I didn’t get lost.
The Space Needle looks interesting and I think would be more so in the summer when there are concerts going on. There is also a seasonal small carnival area that wasn’t open when we were there with carousels, small rides, games and food. I think that would add to the atmosphere. There are several museums right by the Space Needle, including a Science Fiction museum and a Children’s Museum.
We went into the gift store and Caitlin was followed by a security guard like she always is. I think they suspect she is hiding things in her thick, curly hair. She always gets receipts checked. It never fails. And she is the most honest kid you’ll ever meet. We laughed about it and I got directions from the cashier.
5:00 – We left the space needle using my directions I’d gotten and promptly got lost. We circled around, saw some amazing condos with coffee stores in the lobbies. There seems to be a coffee store on nearly every corner in Seattle, many of them StarBucks. Some Seattle Coffee. Others independent. After circling around for a while, we stumbled onto I-5, followed a combination of Mapquest and hotel directions and made it to Bellevue.
5:30 – The view over to Bellevue was amazing. We crossed a big lake and saw houses, teams paddling canoes and mountains in the background. We were too tired to care much.
6:00 – The hotel is not the Crowne Plaza, but it’s clean and we are tired enough not to care at the moment. We did venture out to find a Fred Meyer’s for essentials like hair conditioner and a few snacks. I am proud to say that I made it there and back without getting lost. I must be improving. Now, we are relaxing and getting ready for our trip to Forks tomorrow. Wonder how many times I’ll get lost? We may be driving in some national forest for weeks as there won’t be anyone to ask directions from but the bears and squirrels.
