The flight from Salt Lake to Seattle is pretty incredible on both ends. The Great Salt Lake is so bizarre and colorful. It wins my vote for "landscape that looks most like an abstract painting that I would like to own."
This actually looked much redder.
And I have always loved flying in and out of SeaTac. Mt. Rainier was wearing her little cloud beret, but soon the clouds opened up and I could see the dark, tree-covered land--so different from the desert. So, so different. We flew over Tacoma, and I tried to pick out TS and Jerritt's house, but only found the Tacoma dome. We flew straight over one of the colleges where I used to teach. The Sound was full of ship traffic. It was a beautiful day.
The next afternoon Ross and I met TS, Jerritt, and Nicole for the mobile food fest, but the festival was so popular the food carts were running out of food, so we had to settle for croque madames and pommes-frites with mayo at Cafe Presse.
There was much kicking and smashing and smelling of chestnuts, which Jerritt has been collecting.
All roads eventually lead to Rancho Bravo.
TS sent me this photo from her iPhone.
One evening Ross and I met Drew down at Mecca. Drew rode off on Ross' old, first road bike, which has had about a million different incarnations. It has found a new home. It's too bad I forgot to photograph the beautiful macchiato that Drew made me at Vivace the next day, but I was too busy drinking it. You'll have to believe me that it was delicious and gorgeous--sort of the Platonic ideal macchiato, which you can barely glimpse in your mind anyway. A photo would not do it justice.
Myles happened to be in town for the Antiquarian Book Fair. We met him for brunch, and then perused the fair.
I acquired a few new items...
On the left: sparrows' eggs. On the right: a Jackdaw egg.
And these I picked up when Ross and I wandered past an estate sale. The estate used to be located on an Idaho ranch, but had been packed into a Seattle garage for a few years.
TS and I wandered into the costume shop one afternoon, where I concluded that imagining possible Halloween costumes is at least as fun as actually dressing up.
One of the most exciting discoveries in the Queen Anne neighborhood has been the stairways. It turns out that QA has more public stairways than any other Seattle neighborhood--estimated at 120! If only I had time to visit all of them. I bought Ross a copy of the stairway map so he can find his secret way around.
This was a new stairway for me, and an excellent one at that.
And then the rain came for real, and I packed my backpack, had one last brunch with Ross, stopped by Trader Joe's to load up on cheap coffee, wine, and beer, and drove off into the clouds. Now I must face the downside of fall break. I have a lot of work to do.
