Wednesday and Thursday were the last two days of my Seattle week. Wednesday is when I did my day trip to Olympia, which I'd planned on Sunday, and then Thursday I visited the Seattle Aquarium in the morning and headed off to the Bass Canyon festival in the afternoon.

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

The southbound Amtrak Cascades I had a reservation for would be leaving King Street Station at 7:22 in the morning. At the station, when the doors opened, all the passengers on this train walked out to the platform in a single-file line.

I had to get a photo of the train cars I'd be riding on, because I've never seen them anywhere else on any other Amtrak train. I'd be even more impressed by the interior, as we're about to see. (Also, don't get too confused by the photo; it's not a double-decker, that second level you see is on the Sounder commuter train parked behind the Cascades.)

Wow, I seriously felt like I was sitting on an IC back in Germany. Everything about this passenger car was so much more slick and modern than any other Amtrak train I'd ever ridden. That TV screen never actually turned on during this trip, though.

Weeks later I found out the back story of the train I was riding in. Apparently out of the ten trains plying the Cascades route every day, two of them are Talgo Series 8 trains made by the Spanish company Talgo back in 2009 for the expansion of Amtrak's Hiawatha Service in Wisconsin. These two and at least two others were ready to go when a new governor of Wisconsin was sworn in and immediately axed the expansion. The trains just sat there in mothballs for four years until the Oregon Department of Transportation, which jointly operates the Cascades with Washington, bought two of them. The rest continued to languish in storage for nearly another decade until 2022 when they were bought by the city of Lagos, Nigeria for use in that rapidly-growing city's commuter rail system.

So when the train first departed Seattle, there weren't very many people on it. But in Tacoma, halfway between Seattle and Olympia, it took on 60 more people at once. When the train pulled into Olympia, the time was 8:52, so this was an hour-and-a-half journey. The scheduled arrival time was 8:38, so it was a delay of 14 minutes.

The Olympia-Lacey station is a bit far from the centers of Olympia and Lacey. For me, the only way out was to ride a public bus. The station was on two bus routes so I took the next one leaving for downtown Olympia.

Olympia is the capital of the state of Washington, but it's a rather small city with a population just over 55,000, not too different from that of my home-for-the-moment Clovis, New Mexico. It has a nice little downtown that can be easily navigated on foot, with some great artwork on the sides of some buildings.

But my first objective was to find the building which was my reason for being in Olympia: the Washington State Capitol. This was going to be a little bit of a hike south from downtown. On the way I found something which used to be the state capitol, but wasn't anymore. There was still an interesting historical marker there.

Check this out: women in Washington won the right to vote in 1910, a full decade before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. But what's a little more interesting is this. Remember a year before this when I visited the museum of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia? Among many other things, we learned at that museum that in 1915, five years after the one in Washington, Pennsylvania held a similar referendum, and the women of that state did not win the right to vote then. Washington was definitely ahead of its time on this issue.

The old state capitol.

And now, on to the current capitol building, the reason why I was here...

Sure, it may look impressive enough in this photo, but this just doesn't capture how huge it is. I've taken pictures of 13 other state capitols before this one, most of which have the same basic shape of a rectangular box with a dome atop the center, but this one easily dwarfs them all. It's certainly bigger than the similarly-shaped capitols of West Virginia, Arkansas, Colorado, and Indiana, and I think it may be even bigger than the Texas Capitol.

With that box now ticked off, it was about time for lunch so I walked back north and then to the waterfront to find some seafood.

Quite a wonderful view.

There was a great restaurant there where I stopped for lunch, called Budd Bay. This is a great place for seafood. I had a delicious salmon and arugula salad which also included feta cheese, cucumber, raisins, and pickled onions. They also had plenty of local beer, and I had a pint of African Amber made by Mac & Jack, a brewery based in the Seattle suburb Redmond.

My last stop in Olympia was Rhythms Coffee, for a cup of Ethiopian dark roast. With my train's departure time approaching, I didn't have time for anything else but to ride another bus back to the train station...only to find out that the train had been delayed to 2:18 instead of the originally scheduled 1:53. This isn't the Northeast Corridor, so I suppose delays were to be expected. 25 minutes isn't too bad, though.

This is the Cascades train I rode back to Seattle. Unlike the one I rode in the morning, you'll notice this one doesn't have the sleek, shiny Talgo cars--only two on this route do, out of ten--but rather Horizon cars built in the late '80s. But you'll also notice the engine; it may be hard to see well in this photo, but it's a Siemens Charger, which is pretty new, having only been used on the Cascades since 2017.

I've also got to mention that the train to Seattle was full. As I've said many times before, I was glad to see this. People are actually riding trains. If one is full, that's a good sign.

Back in Seattle, after a brief stop at the Green Tortoise Hostel where I was staying, I walked a bit north to Belltown to see what I could see. Unfortunately, Blank Space Coffee was closed--that's the only problem with all these great local coffee joints, they all close for the day in the early afternoon--so I had to get my coffee from Starbucks. Also in Belltown, I briefly stopped by a record store, Singles Going Steady, which I had visited during my last trip seven years before; most of the music there was punk, which is the one rock sub-genre I know the least about, so I left without buying anything.

Later in the evening, after washing laundry at the hostel, I went back out to explore the eating and drinking establishments around Pike Place, which I hadn't yet done this whole trip. First stop: White Horse Tavern on Post Alley. They had a strong golden ale which was cask-pulled! If you don't know what that means, if an ale is cask-pulled then the tap handle is a mechanical pump and not an electric switch like most other tap handles. So the bartender has to pull on the lever repeatedly to pump the beer out of the keg. This is really common in the UK but extremely rare elsewhere. So anyway I had a glass of this cask-pulled golden ale which cost $10 for as many ounces, but it was good enough to be worth it. Interestingly the change I got back after paying in cash was all in $2 bills.

Just a few steps away on Post Alley is another great spot, Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub. It may be the best Irish pub I've been to this far from Ireland, because they actually make their own beer here! They also serve some great food, like the bowl of clam chowder I had for dinner. As for the beer, they had an amber lager called Belfast Lager and another lager called Irish Style Lager, both of which I drank on that visit. Also I had an Irish coffee, but can't remember if they made it the right way (without Bailey's).

After Kells I walked down to the waterfront expecting to do more bar-hopping, but it turns out everything on the waterfront closes down before the sun sets. So...may as well go back to Kells since it's that good! This time I had two more of their home brews, Irish Ztout (not a typo, that's the name of their stout) and Irish Red. And then, I finished off the night with a shot of Irish whiskey, Redbreast 10. Really, I can't recommend this place enough; if you're in Seattle and like Irish pubs as much as I do, you absolutely have to stop at Kells at least once.

I found this stuck to a fridge in the hostel. "Nice here. But have you ever been to Baden-Württemberg?" That was the German state I used to live in. People from Baden-Württemberg like to leave these stickers wherever they travel. Until now, the furthest away I'd seen one was in Copenhagen.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Thursday was going to be my last day in Seattle, and it was going to be a half day for me since I'd be leaving shortly after lunch. After packing up and checking out of the hostel, but also leaving my baggage in a storage room in the lobby because there was no way I was lugging that thing all over the place, I got my first coffee of the morning again at Seattle Coffee Works. Looking for stuff to do on this last half day in the city, I decided I'd devote this morning to the Aquarium.

When I got to the Aquarium, I found it wasn't yet open, so I went to Pike Street Coffee to kill time and get another coffee.

So, finally, the Seattle Aquarium was open and I could enter.

These are tufted puffins.

If you're there at the right time, you can watch the otters getting their lunch.

The best part of the Aquarium was something I couldn't get a picture of, a virtual reality simulation of diving with whales.

After the Aquarium, I just had to have lunch at a seafood restaurant I'd had a couple drinks at a couple days earlier, and wanted to have a meal at later: The Crab Pot, which is on the touristy waterfront. They could make a salad with a salmon skewer on it, and this is what I had for lunch, along with a Crab Pot Lager.

Not much more time left, but I found one interesting stop to make. Copperworks Distilling is across the street from the waterfront. Usually I'm more drawn to breweries and wineries, but this looked like it was worth a look. This place makes vodka, whiskey, and gin, and you can have four-shot flights. For one thing, I learned from the bartender there more than I ever knew about what liquors are made from: mostly cereal grains. I knew that whiskey was made from barley, but for some reason or another I'd mistakenly assumed that vodka was mostly made from potatoes (it can be, but often isn't) and gin from berries (nope, the berries are added for flavoring).

First I had a gin flight, which was four shots, each of a different gin made at Copperworks. Then I had what they call a core flight, consisting of one vodka shot, two gin, and one whiskey. There was still time for more so may as well have a whiskey flight on top of that. It's not like I was going to be driving anywhere! Really, this was some impressive booze and I would've bought a bottle of it if I'd had any room to pack it.

Well, that was going to be the end of my week in Seattle. After I collected my luggage from the hostel, the next stop was the Northgate Station mall where I'd be meeting my friend there who I'd be riding to the Bass Canyon festival with. I bought myself a one-way ticket on the light rail and rode it to Northgate, which at that time was the northernmost stop on the 1-Line.

SoundTransit Link train at Northgate Station. This light rail system may not serve everywhere it needs to, but it's expanding. At the time I'm writing this, August of 2023, the 1 Line is the only one in Seattle--there's also the T Line in Tacoma--but they're planning to add a 2 Line, 3 Line, and 4 Line in the near future.

Soon I'd be on a road trip deep into the center of the state of Washington, which looks and feels a lot different than anything I'd seen thus far...