Lately, I’ve been sleeping fairly late—usually around 3 AM—because I’ve been going to my condo’s gym past midnight in order to exercise when nobody is around to minimize contact and avoid COVID-19 exposure. Consequently, this means that my schedule is completely broken when I have to do some­thing early in the morning. Unfortunately, today, one of the things I had to do early in the morning was catch a 6 AM flight.

I don’t work well with sleep deprivation, but I had no choice at this point, because I didn’t have enough time to reset my sleep schedule in preparation for travel. I considered staying up all night as to not miss my flight, but every time I try to stay up late, I suffer from an overwhelming wave of drow­si­ness, so I ended up taking two two-hour naps, then slept on the plane.

Once in a while, I woke up from my naps on the plane to look out the window. One of the times, we were flying over what appeared to be the Michigan area, when I saw… a massive blanket of snow covering everything. I took a photograph.

Shortly afterwards, the snow cleared up, and the view turned into this:

Very confused as to how this section of the country had literally no snow, I looked back to the photograph that I had just taken prior to this. I then dis­covered that I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation and/or stupidity, and that it wasn’t actually a blanket of snow that we were flying over, but rather, a blanket of clouds.

This should serve as proof that you should never interrupt me while I’m sleeping, otherwise I will forget the difference between snow and clouds, among doing other incredibly brain-dead things.

After just shy of five hours of travel time across two flights (with a layover), I finally made it to Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia.

Upon landing, I hopped on the rental car shuttle and got a ride to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, my preferred car rental company. As the shuttle was turning into the rental lot, my face literally turned into the heart eyes emoji. I spotted a Ram Rebel.

I booked a mid-size crossover because I plan on touring Washington, D.C., and I imagined that it will be much more convenient to have a smaller vehicle to find street parking more easily, as opposed to having a full-size pickup truck like I usually get, which basically takes up one and a half street parking spots.

But when you see a Ram Rebel on the lot and Enterprise offers it to you, you cannot say no.

So I have a Ram Rebel now.

I already know I am going to regret this decision.

My main takeaways (big-picture ones, that weren’t already covered in previous blog posts):

• Seattle is surprisingly dynamically terraneous. It has a very diverse mixture of water, hills, vegetation, and man-made structures. Most cities have a “theme” to them, but Seattle feels like its theme is just having a little bit of everything.
• Cities near the ocean are usually unbearably humid for me, but for some reason, Seattle didn’t actually really seem that humid.
• It’s nice going places with a travel companion. If I hadn’t brought my assistant Monica along with me, I probably wouldn’t have had the motivation to explore the city as much as I did, and the trip definitely wouldn’t have been as fun.
• Even though I’ve seen all the hate towards law enforcement associated with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests on the news, it was still ex­treme­ly unsettling to see all the anti-police vandalism in-person in downtown Seattle at the former site of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
• As an extension of my previous point, walking around Capitol Hill made me realize that maybe politics does actually matter, and that the proper political balance of a city might be something that is important to consider when picking a home. It was perplexing to me that, even two months after the reclamation of CHAZ, the city government still hasn’t properly cleaned it up.

I also have a handful of food photos that didn’t fit in other blog posts. Funny enough, I’m going to start off the “food photos” section with a photo of the Gum Wall (does the gum count as food?), which ended up being just as repulsive in-person as I assumed it was from others’ photos.

One of my first meals of Seattle was a chashu rice bowl from Menya Musashi Tsukemen & Ramen in the Pike/Pine corridor. It was actually cooked shock­ing­ly well—the meat had a deep, rich flavor; the egg was just the perfect amount of runny; and the vegetables added a subtle crisp to balance out the texture of the overall dish

The first meal we had together with the “full crew” after everyone flew in was at the Dreamland Bar & Diner in Fremont. When I go to a new restaurant, I like trying their “specialty” dish. One way to determine their signature dish is to see what’s named after the restaurant. I used this strategy for Dream­land and got the Dreamland burger. It wasn’t stellar, but it wasn’t bad, either.

The most expensive dish I had was some baked Alaskan halibut from Anthony’s Pier 66 & Bell Street Diner in Belltown. The fish was nice, but the por­tion size was disappointingly small, and at right around US$50 with tax and tip included, I definitely don’t think it was worth it.

And finally, I feel like this wouldn’t be a proper end-of-travel blog post anymore without a rental car review.

I usually book a pickup truck, but because I was the designated driver for our production crew, I got an SUV instead so we could transport all their gear in safety, as rental pickup trucks generally do not come with tonneau covers. I requested an American SUV, but unfortunately, they didn’t have any avail­able, so I ended up driving away with a 2019 Hyundai Tucson.

The Tucson ended up having the same issue that I tend to have with most other Asian-manufactured vehicles with low-end engines, which is that the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal are completely off-parallel. What I mean by that is that you literally have to floor the accelerator in order to get the vehicle to show any semblance of movement, but even a slight tap on the brakes will make you feel like you’re a teenager learning how to drive with Brembos.

Even with me regularly flooring the accelerator, though, the crossover still managed to average 30 miles per gal­lon throughout my whole trip, which I found to be impressive (I imagine that if I drove my personal pickup truck like I did this SUV, I would prob­a­bly be looking at something close to 14 MPG). I guess the high fuel economy is reasonable and expected, though—this is a relatively small vehicle that seemed to be designed for efficiency.

If you’re a patient individual who drives for utility rather than fun, and you’re looking for an affordable small crossover, then I think the Hyundai Tucson wouldn’t be bad, especially considering how reliable Hyundai’s vehicles have gotten lately. But if you’re looking for something capable, or are already used to the power and torque of a pickup truck … hard pass.

And with that trip, I add two additional states—Washington and Oregon—to my list of visited states, bringing my total up to 23 out of 50.

Setting the record for what I believe is the most I’ve ever driven in a single day, Monica and I set off this morning for Portland, Oregon, a three-hour drive down south from where we’re staying in Seattle. Unfortunately, our Seattle trip isn’t long enough for us to be able to spend more time in Portland, so we were only able to allocate a single day for the cause, and did the reverse three-hour drive straight back to Seattle upon nightfall.

Our former PUBG Coach and Manager, and current Acquisitions Assistant, lives out in the Portland suburbs, so we stopped by to visit him while we were in the Pacific Northwest. We grabbed some dinner together with him at a Korean barbecue restaurant, during which we proceeded to literally somehow start a grease fire at our table. After that gem of an experience, we grabbed some boba tea and went sightseeing around Portland.

Portland was nowhere near as interesting as I thought it would be, but at the very least, I can now check off Oregon in my list of states that I’ve visited.