Olympia -> Seattle

Saturday 2 August 2008. Most of these days that I have been saying the weather has been overcast and sunny, it's been a bit cloudy and slightly cool in the mornings but then warming up in the afternoon and being warm right the way until the sun goes down.

Mmm I had very good eggs benedict at Spar Cafe (which is another McMenamins) for breakfast. Then it was back on the road to drive to Seattle. I'm really getting used to these freeways, I think it'll be a bit of a shock to my system coming back up from Wellington.

We dropped our stuff off and headed out on a bus/walking tour of Seattle. We had a snack at the Cold Stone Creamery which is an icecream store. They have different recipes for the food you can buy there, and they have these cold, flat stones (clever name, eh) and they get some icecream and put it on there with flat icecream scoops. Then they smush it down a bit and flatten it out, then add whatever else you want and mash the whole lot together. I had a 'black forest' one so I got cherry stuff, two squares of brownie and fudge mixed in. Man, it was good.

Lots of food places here seem to have gimmicks - in this store, if you tip them they all gather around and sing a song. This happened when we were there and they sung to the tune of 'The lion sleeps tonight' - On the cold stone, the creamy cold stone, we're making your icecream - or something similar.

We wandered around looking at things (visited the main Seattle public library with funky architecture) until dusk. Then we headed to where Juno was going to be shown on a screen, outside the Seattle Centre. It was time for food so we popped into a food court and just managed to order before they closed. I was craving Kiwi fish-and-chips and managed to get some food with fish and chips which was kind of close enough. So we walked around some more until it was dark and time to head over to the Seattle Centre to watch Juno.

I enjoyed watching Juno(accompanied by red licorice as feature in the movie) but we soon realised that we were under-prepared for the temperature drop once the sun set. There were some LOVELY people next to us, I say that because I (half)jokingly hit them up for one of their blankets, and they actually loaned it to us! It made the experience far more enjoyable.

It felt a little surreal, three people squished into sitting on a rain jacket with a blanket shared as best as possible, watching Juno on a huge screen with the Space Needle all lit up in the background. There were seagulls flying around and the light reflected off their white bellies which also looked cool and added to the atmosphere for me.

After the movie I profusely thanked the nice blanket-people and offered them every food item from my bag.

We headed home and played a couple of songs on Rock Band on xbox 360. I was playing on the drums and had a great time... until I had to sleep on the couch. Haha, it was all good, really.