We woke up early, about seven. After a small breakfast and some last minute packing Michelle’s father picked us up and drove us to the airport. Luckily that whole process was uneventful and our plane left for Nashville on time, right around 11 o’clock.
On the flight we had some peanuts and drinks. I amused myself with Southwest’s on-board magazine, Spirit, while Michelle read Our State (an interesting article about 1954’s Hurricane Hazel therein) and the kids plowed through Game of Thrones book 4 and The Serpent’s Shadow or some such.
On landing in Nashville I attempted to go to the restroom on the plane. My goodness, it was even smaller than I remembered. I ended up just giving up on the idea in frustration and just washed the hands and vacated the place. When I came out one of the flight attendants had stuffed herself in an overhead bin and was freaking out the people coming on at Nashville for the flight to Seattle.
Southwest flight attendant being silly
While the flight to Nashville had been packed the flight to Seattle was not nearly as full, giving people room to stretch out. The snacks were also a bit more grand — a choice of cheese Ritz, shortbread cookies, Chips Ahoy!, etc. No inflight movie or anything, despite the four hour and fifteen minute flight. Oh, how times have changed.
Genetta, seated in the row ahead of us, had some conversation with the lady in the aisle seat of her row and learned that the reason we couldn’t get a hotel in Seattle was due to a Microsoft conference. Well, technically, we could’ve gotten a room in downtown Seattle but at $700 or so a night that was a big fat NO.
I amused myself reading Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book that manages to be hilarious thirty years after I first read it. What a gifted writer. We all took some time napping as well, especially for the first two-thirds of the trip over the very boring Great Plains. Honestly, they aren’t that bad, at ground level. But from the air, snooze…
Things got a bit more interesting once we were over western Montana and the mountains started rising. We saw Kalispell, Montana as well as the Spokane River of eastern Washington. As we got nearer Seattle I could see Mount Rainier to the left of our plane. We were sadly seated on the right side so I asked the gentleman in the window seat of the left side row to take a few pictures. While mine would’ve at least been zoomed in a bit he still managed to capture a bit of the sight of the 14,000′ mountain rising well above the clouds.
Beautiful scenery en route to Seattle, somewhere over Montana or Idaho
Spokane River, eastern Washington
Mount Rainier, just below the wing tip, rising above the clouds
One thing that greatly amused me was at one point Addison was complaining about how long the flight was as we were passing over the most rugged of terrain. It reminded me of the Louis C.K. bit about people complaining about their texts taking a few seconds despite the fact that they are going to space and back. One hundred fifty years ago the trip from Nashville to Seattle would’ve taken many, many months and involved a great amount of peril. What would those pioneers think of us complaining about a four hour flight, in comfortable AC, and snacks to do the same?
We set down in a mostly cloudy Seattle at SeaTac a little ahead of time (again, the pioneers would scoff!) at around 3 o’clock local time. There were many cool airlines you just don’t see in the South like Frontier and Alaskan. We scurried down towards baggage claim. We each wanted to stop (there was an especially cool “street” of shops in the main concourse, and Genetta wanted some coffee), but other than a quick bathroom break we resolved to push on as we didn’t want to strand our bags.
Docks on approach to SeaTac
Nifty Frontier plane. Love the tail!
It’s a good thing we pushed on, the luggage was either all out or came out almost immediately. After scooping them up we headed out to the shuttle to take us to our rental car, passing interesting sculpture like one made of luggage (unclaimed, I bet!). What’s neat about SeaTac is they have a “Rental Car Facility” which is really like a terminal for rental car companies. We walked up to the Enterprise representatives and quickly checked in, then took an elevator down a floor (the facility is at the top of a parking deck that holds all of the companies’ cars) to our car. We got a standard SUV, a Dodge (ugh, I can’t escape them) Journey.
Luggage sculpture, SeaTac
It is a little small, but seemed OK so we rolled with it. It is nice that it isn’t a behemoth like an Excursion that would make city driving or winding mountain roads difficult. What is funky about it, however, is that there is no key — just a fob. So long as the fob is in the car the driver can just push a button to start. That took us a bit to get used to, including on check-in to our hotel when we thought the car was off but it really wasn’t. It had 12,360 or so miles on it — we’ll hang another 3,000 plus to that in the coming weeks!
Our hotel, a Holiday Inn, was only a few blocks from the airport. The room was nice, though we could only get the single King with sleeper sofa (everything was booked otherwise). After a short rest we headed out to find some grub.
We drove a short ways to Westfield Mall. Along the way we passed over a really neat elevated rail line. We decided to eat at BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse (yes, Don, a beer joint). It was quite tasty, with Michelle and Genetta having pizza and Addison and I delicious burgers. Satiated, we left to find the AMC theater in the mall showing the new Batman movie. We ended up circling the whole mall before coming back to very near where we had been parked at first.
The mall was very cool but didn’t really offer any really unique shopping (I figured maybe there’d at least be a WotC store given it is Seattle). The AMC was at the top on the third floor. We all enjoyed the movie though my knees started hurting so bad. I fidgeted for an our or so before finally giving up and going to the front row where I could stretch them. I don’t know how I’m going to survive The Hobbit in December. My knees just can’t handle it, especially after five to six hours in the plane earlier.
Afterwards we drove back to the hotel via McDonald’s (the only place to reliably get sweet tea when outside of the South) and a road that surprised us. While most of the roads we had been on had been flat this one went right over a high, wooded, wild ridge before emerging in the adjacent valley that contains SeaTac. We passed a flight attendant ascending the steep hill with pull-behind luggage and wearing high heels — don’t know how she managed.
Found out from the receptionist that we can do Seattle tomorrow without having to drive all around — the train we saw earlier has a stop right across the street. So fortunate! Back at the room I blogged while the family slept.