Good-bye Montana, hello Seattle

We knew the drive to Seattle was going to be a long one, and we weren’t looking forward to being confined in the car for so many hours again! Northwestern Montana truly is beautiful! Since we hadn’t had any phone service (and obviously internet connection) for several days, we stopped at an adorable coffee house in the town of Kalispell, Montana to try and figure out where we would be staying in Seattle. We both agree that Montana has extremely good looking people! We then got on the road again, driving through beautiful mountains all along the way. We stopped in the historic town of Wallace, Idaho for lunch, anxiously wanting to eat some sort of potato. We both ended up getting grilled salmon sandwiches – Christian getting POTATO chips on the side and Marisa choosing POTATO salad. We were really feeling exhausted from the drive and feeling a bit scared that we could not find a place to sleep in Seattle – after 2 hours calling hostels, hotels and motels throughout Seattle, we finally were given a recommendation to stay at Columbus Motor Inn, which we were told, was a 10-minute drive from downtown Seattle. By the time we reached our $75-per-night motor inn (what happened to $30 per night motels??), we were physically ill from driving so much. We checked into our room (and were asked by the owner if we wanted to ‘upgrade’ our room to the one with the round Jacuzzi/hot tub – which we declined), and were horrified, but too tired to even care, about what our $75 per-night room looked like. Our king size bed’s headboard was covered in 1970’s teal plush carpet (which matched the carpet on the floor) and there was shiny butterfly wallpaper and Asian screen dividers mounted on the walls. We took showers and motivated ourselves to check out downtown Seattle for dinner – besides, it was a Friday night! We drove to the touristy part of Seattle, where the piers are. We ended up eating an overpriced seafood dinner of mussels and fried fish. We had planned to check out a local dive bar, but were simply too tired to do anything. Back to our motor inn for a good night’s sleep! We woke up feeling somewhat refreshed and drove downtown for breakfast. Over breakfast (in Belltown) we researched cool neighborhoods to visit – and ended up driving to Capitol Hill, a small, funky, gay-friendly neighborhood. We ended up walking around for a bit, but ended up at a small neighborhood park, where we crashed on the ground, in the sun, for a bit. We made fun of the fact that we had just left 2 days of nature-everything in Glacier, only to be at a park in the city of Seattle! We ended our Seattle experience by going to Pike Place Market (where the fish market is where they sing and throw fish to each other). It was packed with tourists and locals – what an amazing selection of produce and flowers! We bought a bushel of fresh raspberries and sat on a bench (outside of the first Starbucks opened in 1971). It was somewhat amusing to see people waiting 30 minutes in line to buy a latte at the first-ever Starbucks. I guess they didn’t know that they new Starbucks one block away served the same latte and had no line. As we walked back to the car to head out of Seattle, 2 totally naked men on bicycles passed us. We were speechless. As we drove 5 minutes down the street, 2 naked individuals turned into about 20 or 25 naked men, women and even 1 little boy. We were laughing so hard (and snapping as many pictures as possible)! Oh the liberal West Coast! We hit the road and were happy to know that Eugene, Oregon was on a 4 hour drive away!