William Reardon’s Blog

There’s an inherit value in planning out a vacation. Not necessarily a plan to be strictly followed, but maybe a rough agenda. One that can be discarded if a better option should come along, but also one to provide guidance in the lack of options. It is with this lack of agenda that this vacation was embarked upon.

Some of the unexpected, was, frankly, to be expected. Especially with my family — in fact, those parts aren’t even so bad. At some point you become amused of the eccentricities of your own family. Take for example, our first night here. My sister, Terri, Jason, and Quinn spend the better part of a day flying from Raleigh, I spend a few hours flying from LA, none of us having been to Seattle before, and where is our first visit? A mega-store that is essentially a combined grocery and Target store, wherein we shop for roughly an hour, filling roughly two groceries carts. Really, at this point in my life, if I don’t know to expect that, I’m the one who’s crazy.

Today, however, I feel safe in saying I’m not the one who was crazy. No, today it was my sister. Possibly my brother-in-law. Honestly, I’m suspicious of both. Quinn gets a pass, because a six-month old infant, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the one who decided to park the car literally two miles away from Gas Works park. Two miles uphill. It’s hard to say who to blame for having the idea that Jimmy & I should head over to the park to stake out our territory around 5:00pm. 5:00 for fireworks that were to start at 10. Perhaps it was because in checking out the view from the Space Needle, it was clear that Gas Works park was already starting to have quite a crowd built up.

Regardless, I have to say waiting 5 hours for 30 minutes of fireworks, followed by lugging 30 pounds of gear 2 miles, uphill, back to the car was a… dubious decision at best. Although, by them self, the fireworks where cool. Choreographed to the music, at points them seemed to dance in a manner reminiscent of the Bellagio fountains. Hats off to the people of Seattle. After all, they can’t be held responsible for our parking spot.

It looks like there won’t be any whale watching this trip. Any of the outing require a very, very early morning wake-up. In a hope to learn from the past, we have a rough plan for tomorrow, starting with the Underground City before lunch & then the salmon channels in the afternoon. Tuesday, we’ll head over to Microsoft, check out Jimmy’s office, buy drastically reduced software from their store, and eat at their cafeteria prior to my having to be dropped off at the airport.

Oh yeah, I also did meet a well-read clerk at Border’s today. I picked up Booknotes: Stories from American History as I’ve just about finished David Sedaris’ new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and wanted something for the flight back. I also picked up The Rule of Four, just in case Booknotes sucked, but that’s not what caught the clerk’s eye. He asked me if I was interested in history, and after a short discussion proceed to recommend several books that I hadn’t heard of: William Cronon in general, and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West & Changes in the Land in particular, followd by Donal Miller‘s City of the Century.

Anyway, Rocky IV is on TV. Holy crap, I forgot what a great movie this is. Look at Rocky, building himself up in the Siberian wilderness, while Drago goes high-tech. Drago’s declaration that Rocky is not a man, but a piece of metal. Rocky’s speech of prophetic speech of change: “If I can change… and if you can change… the whole world can change!” Timeless. Stupid commies. Adddrriiiiaaannnnn!!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2004 at 2:57 am and is filed under non-sequitur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.