Vacations

This vacation made me aware of some new thinking.

I am enjoying Seattle to some extent. It's nice, has some interesting things to see. But it's not driving me wild. Some people said it was a "great" place to visit and would make a good vacation, but (having done this now) I disagree. It's a "great" place to visit if you're on a business trip and have an extra day or two to kick around. But it is not a great place to spend you one yearly vacation at.

Debbie is loving it much more than I am, and here is my new theory about places to take vacations.

How much you enjoy the place you visit depends a great deal on what you left behind in your day to day life. If you left behind a job, you will enjoy your vacation. If you left behind a stressful job and home responsibilities, you will have a wonderful vacation wherever you go. If you are retired and have your daily life to your own desires, your vacation standards are a lot higher. You expect that on your vacation you should be doing something better and experiencing more wonderful things than your usual day-to-day life, and that gets hard when every day you can do whatever you want anyway.

For me, for example, Boston is much much nicer than Seattle, and I see Boston every week. Debbie does not see Boston that much, so she likes Seattle more than I do.

For me, paddling in my kayak 10 miles from here is much much nicer than driving 6 hours to see what Portland is like. Debbie does not go out kayaking, and she did not have to drive to Portland (I did), so for her the Portland trip was not so bad.

So . . . how much you enjoy your vacation really depends on the day-to-day life you left behind. And when someone tells you "Oh, I loved our vacation to [ - - - - ]", you have to ask them what their day-to-day life is like (do they have a tough job? raising kids? roof leaks? ). Then take their vacation remarks with a grain of salt.

For me, I have decide no more visits to US cities - I've seen enough of them, they will not make my life more interesting.

Vacationing in Europe, I think, has really spoiled me.

Seattle

Noisy (and I'm deaf!). Crowded with people. Jammed with traffic. Homeless beggars everywhere. Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, Women's Rights, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice etc etc etc solicitors on every single corner asking for your cash.

Very pretty buildings, for a big city. Excellent food and coffee. Very very pleasant and helpful clerks, waiters etc. And interesting tourist markets.

The hotel was close to the Space Needle and all the good touristy scientific exhibits in the city. The monorail stop is right there too. The only downer was the extensive street construction going on everywhere, and the streets are designed with lots of overpasses and underpasses and you can't usually turn at the cross street you're hoping too.

We walked and monorailed everywhere except for the two days we rented a car to go to the St. Michelle Vineyard and then down to Portland, OR.

Drivers are unbelieveably courteous! Never see anyone block an intersection (except some tourist driver !) and they stop for pedestrians crossing.

Portland

Portland, OR has (by a huge amount) the largest collection of homeless people in the USA. By my reckoning, it beats San Fransisco on this account by about 3X.

The city is clean and very nicely designed, and we did not see any "run down" areas, but the homeless are everywhere and some areas (like the nicely landcaped parks) are literally communities for the homeless.

We had rented a car, drove 3 hours to get there. Did some shopping in the lovely upscale malls. Walked around town for about 2 hours and got kind of weary of slipping between groups of homeless people and street people. Got in the car and drove 3 hours back.

I marked it off as "bad day".

The last day in Seattle: coffee and a wicked great Panini at this place called Boticelli, then Debbie got a tattoo, then we grabbed a few beers and wines and rubbed elbows with the locals.

Time to head home now.