Seattle

18 August 2015

The trains made themselves heard throughout the night, but we must have kept falling asleep after each one as we woke at eight refreshed.

Whilst charging phones, iPads, camera etc this morning, I realised that my new Sony DSLR wasn't in the room. Having turned the room upside-down and searched the car, I have come to think that I left it somewhere at Seattle Airport. Either on the shuttle bus to the car rental office, or somewhere around the car rental office. To cut a long story short, I made several phone calls to the airport and car rental company and have drawn a blank. Lynn kindly submitted an online report to the airport for me too. I suppose it is just possible it wil turn up, but we will have left the area. They say that if the find it, they would ship it to me -fingers crossed. I can live with the camera loss, perhaps the insurance will pay for that, but the pictures on the camera were more valuable, particularly the ones of the Grizzly.

We left the hotel at around 1030 and headed north up the I-5 to Quil Ceda where the Seattle Premier Outlet Centre is located. The centre is adjacent to a Casino situated on a Native American Reservation.

There were apparently at least 125 outlet shops there covering just about every fashion brand imaginable. Both of us had short shopping lists and set out to fulfil them. I bought Levi's jeans and a pair of scandals for much less than I would have paid in UK.

After a couple of hours, we moved on to a large Walmart, just down the road, where we bought some essential supplies for our road-trip. A small cool box, paper plates, plastic glasses, a chopping board and a knife. We also restocked our fruit supplies too.

Back at the hotel, I went for a walk around Edmonds, it is a very pleasant place. I imagine property prices are rather high here. I found another restaurant near the ferry embarkation point too. I also walked around the town centre where there are lots of small shops and cafes.

We returned on foot to the ferry restaurant and sat on the terrace outside and watched the loading and unloading activity on the ferry. Food was American Pub food, but we had a basket of fried seafood which was very tasty. It was hot in the sun, but rather pleasant watching the world go past. The guy directing the loading operation at the traffic lights next to the restaurant was an expert at spotting queue-jumpers! They all got stopped and held up until everyone else had gone through!

We walked back to Emonds Marsh, a small estuarine wildlife area next to the hotel, but there really wasn't much to see apart from a couple of Heron and some ducks and geese. It was a bit disappointing really.

Tomorrow, we leave the Pacific coast and start heading east towards Minneapolis. The road trip begins!

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