Hello, Seattle

Hey folks! The S.O. and I have arrived safely in Seattle.

I’ll do another post talking about some of the awesome stuff we saw on the roadtrip out, but we’ve had some upsets in our scheduling and I haven’t had my computer this week (the S.O. ended up having a lot of virtual education to do for his work and needed it) so you’ll have to settle with this brief post for now about my experiences in the city so far.

We’ll be moving a lot while we’re in Seattle, and this month we’re staying with a friend from the writing community. M. Huw Evans co-edited Pocket Workshop: Essays on living as a writer, and is a long-time supporter of the Clarion West writing workshop. We met back in 2015 at the World Fantasy Convention. So it’s been a really fun week of talking books.

The weather in Seattle has been surprisingly hot, averaging around 85 or so since we’ve arrived, with bright, sunny days. Not what was advertised on the package, but then again, this year everyone’s weather is a little weird. So far the smoke from the fires seems to be blowing east, and yesterday we got to see Mt. Ranier as we were driving home!

That said, Seattle is really big. We’ve been pretty amazed by how much of this city there is. Some part of me does wish we had landed in one of the smaller cities in the state, but everyone here has been incredibly nice so far, and there’s been a lot of great food and we’ve already found some parks and oases of green to keep us from being overwhelmed. That last part is pretty easy, actually, since even on the more dense city streets it seems like everything here is green. It’s a balm after the miles of desert and plains.

Still, it’s a surprisingly car-driven city. For me to make it from the neighborhood we are in to the neighborhood where I want to take silks would take me over an hour by transit, but only twenty minutes by car. That’s disappointing considering Seattle’s reputation. And while there is a lot of cycling infrastructure, it doesn’t seem as complete as I would have hoped. That said, I haven’t gotten to explore cycling since we left our bikes at home. We’re debating getting a bicycle or two, but we haven’t finished examining our options on that front. We want to make sure we use them if we make the investment.

So yeah, a lot of logistics and up-in-the-air decisions. But overall things are going well. More to come on our roadtrip and experiences in the city!

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