Did we mention that we went to Seattle last month?  Oh, cos we did.

To be more precise, we spent about a week in Seattle in early March, partially for vacation and partially for conference attendance.  I don’t have a whole lot of pictures from the trip mainly because Shane had the fancy camera, and he hasn’t posted them yet (or has posted them as friends/family only) – also because I spent most of the trip inside a conference center, while he spent it wandering around.  To be honest I’m hoping that this post will be the nudge he needs to actually talk about his adventures – but that’s neither here nor there.

Mel and Ray were our gracious hosts for the duration of our visit – showing us around their not-so-recently adopted city, making us delicious food (and margaritas!), driving us back and forth to the airport and also to Twin Peaks locations.  I met Mel and Ray in Champaign in 2004, back when I was really involved in NaNoWriMo, and was terribly sad when they moved to Seattle in 2005.  We haven’t had many non-Bonnaroo opportunities to hang out since then, so I really enjoyed having a lot of downtime to chat, eat, and renew our friendship.  I also enjoyed their enthusiasm for daytrips, as with our trip to the Great Northern Hotel:

and to the Double R Diner (now Twede’s), where we shared a slice of cherry pie:

In addition to Twin Peaks-y things, we spent a glorious afternoon at the Pike Place Market, drank fancy drinks in a variety of locations, caught up with a lot of friends ranging back to high school, toured the Seattle Public Library, and snuck into some library things (or at least Shane did – I was legitimately there to give a talk on the Facebook roadshow).

This marked both of our first trips to the Pacific Northwest, aside from a family trip to Vancouver when I was a kid, and we both really liked what we saw.  Navigating on foot and by mass-transit can be challenging, especially when there are OMG HILLS, but I also feel like you get to see and know a lot more of the city that way.  I hope that next time we visit Seattle I get more time to bum around, eat remarkable cupcakes, and enjoy many more damn fine cups of coffee!