With so many of our new employees being in the Seattle Metropolitan Area, I’ve added a week-long visit to Seattle as part of my routine trips, in addition to the already-existing Southern California trips. This past week, I went to visit some co-workers and friends to get some work done and do some more exploring.
The day after arriving, my plan was to stay around the Seattle area and visit one of my co-workers. The night of landing in Seattle, I stayed in a hotel overlooking Puget Sound; it had a nice view the following morning after the sun came up.
Right before checking out, a friendly seagull came to visit me right in front of my window. At first I was concerned it would fly away, so I started taking photos from far away just so I could make sure I had a picture of it, but as I got closer, it stood its ground; eventually, I was able to get right up to it and get some close-ups. That particular area right next to the window is slightly covered by the ledge above, so I’m guessing it was happily sitting there for some shelter from the rain.
Over the weekend, I visited Doug Wreden, mostly just to spend time together and play video games. On Saturday, I joined him as a guest on his Twitch live stream where we played Tetris 99, TypeRacer, and Mario Party with his viewers. Content from this stream has been added to the “Collaborations” section of my YouTube channel.
After squeezing in a few more work days early on in the week, I spent the final day before departure with Allie, who you may remember as the owner of the cats Simon and Henry.
She has apparently walked past the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in downtown Seattle a handful of times but never actually went in, so we took my trip here as an opportunity to check it out. It’s basically like three very large Starbucks stores put together, with some special menu items and even a section for alcohol. There was also a section where you could see a lot of the coffee-making machinery, as well as a coffee library in the corner that was a lot quieter than the main area.
After coffee, we visited the NEKO Cat Café, considering both of us are cat enthusiasts. You may remember that, the last time I was here, we went to Meowtropolitan; this time, we decided to try out a different cat café that was in walking distance of the Roastery that we were already at.
NEKO was quite a pleasant surprise, because apparently, they had moved all the adult cats to a different location, and the only cats available in the Seattle location were kittens. If you’re familiar with cats, you know that some of them take some time to familiarize with you, so they may be shy at first; these kittens weren’t like that at all, and they were all eager to snuggle and get picked up.
After almost an hour in kitten heaven, we got some dinner at Kizuki Ramen.
We ate at their Capitol Hill location, which made me slightly concerned due to potential political riots after Kyle Rittenhouse inevitably gets found innocent in his ongoing murder trial, but the jury was still deliberating by the end of the day and didn’t come to a verdict, so we were able to enjoy a peaceful dinner.
Afterwards, we drove around a bit in Seattle to do some sightseeing, then I dropped Allie off so she could go home for the night.
After my flight today, I’m back in Texas—I flew back into Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, then drove out to Decatur to spend a night here a bit closer to my next destination so I could break up the monotony of the drive tomorrow by a little bit.
I still have a few photos to share of my time in Dallas, but not quite enough for it to warrant its own entire blog post, so I’m most likely going to do a Texas round-up after I wrap up my stay in Amarillo and make it to Albuquerque.