Waterworld

(these days pretty far away from) SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

I don't know why, but long before I began to travel significantly I was interested in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. My tastes from those days don't make a lot of sense to me now. What was it about Washington State and its most popular city? Big trees? Mountains? Large bodies of water? A cool name? I honestly cannot remember.

Whatever the reason(s), Seattle happened to be at the end of the train line I was taking from Minneapolis, so ride #3 was the last - Whitefish to here. It was also the most pleasant. 85 bucks these days buys you a "roommette", Amtrak-speak for a small sleeping compartment. Now this might seem kinda pricey to those of you 45-dollar-a-night-at-the-Super-8 types (full disclosure: I stayed at the Super 8s in Williston and Whitefish). But first of all those beds are mighty comfortable, it's quiet save for the whoosh and hum of the train, and sleeping through the night is a fine way to burn through 12+ hours of travel time.

I slept well, oh yes I did. I usually sleep well; I'm pretty good at it. When I woke up, we had flown through Idaho and were in Spokane. Hmmm, interesting. I then went back to bed for a good nap and woke up next to a big body of water. My Seattle-area geography isn't good - the only waterous area in the neighborhood I knew of, save for the Pacific Ocean, was Puget Sound. This couldn't be Puget Sound, I told myself with no basis in experience whatsoever. Puget Sound was on the other side of the city.

The slightly doddering and perhaps too old train conductor came around to ask if she could make my bed for the next passenger. Sure, I said. And by the way, what body of water is this?

Puget Sound, she answered as she went to rip my covers off.

There is a reason I rely on maps so heavily rather than my own sense of direction and geography. Because the latter sucks rocks.

The great advantage of train travel, as most Europeans can tell you, is that you usually get dumped nearly in the middle of the target city. Seattle's King Street station - for you architecture groupies designed by the same company that did New York's Grand Central - is a short walk from the Pioneer Square district, Seattle's "old town" (relatively speaking, of course). My first few hours or so were spent on a walking tour of the district's underground. Americans, you see, had a fetish for stubbornly building cities on terrain that pretty much guarantee disaster (hello, San Francisco!). Seattle was no different - its original center was constructed on several acres of mud well watered by the adjoining Elliott Bay. Since the bay had an inconvenient habit of flooding the low-lying marshland nearby, the city fathers wisely decided to raise the overall level of the city. Today, the sidewalks and building facades of Original Ground Floor Seattle are one level underneath the modern city. Though the tour through the old brick alleyways wasn't all that informative or deeply fascinating, it was a good and appopriately unusual introduction to an unusual city.

Modern tourist Seattle can be covered quickly and easily. A few hours will take in Pioneer Square and the city's first skyscraper, the white plaster Smith Building looming overhead. A few hours more provides enough time to explore Pike Place Market (home of the original Starbucks! Oh boy!) and the waterfront district, freshly revived and chain-stored in that American Historic Waterfront District sort of way. Central Seattle ramps up strenuously from the waterfront, so your average 37-year old blogger, for example, will probably hump and puff a bit getting up to the downtown monorail station. The resulting quick ride brings the traveler to the Seattle Center. This is a clump of sports arenas and museums home to the Space Needle, a fine 605-foot (184 meter) piece of tourism planted deep in the landscape.

The Space Needle is the best spot to absorb the odd Seattle geography. The city's surroundings are basically big chunks of land scattered around water flowing from and to the Pacific. To the west, Elliott Bay, basically a small coastal village in the city that is Puget Sound. A thin waterway leads from the Sound and cuts the downtown areas off from the northern suburbs. This canal is interrupted occasionally by fatter blobs of water like Salmon Bay and Hydroplane Central, otherwise known as Lake Union. To the east, Puget Sound little brother Lake Washington surrounds and borders some of the better city suburbs.

One of these was home for me. Mercer Island is a rich slice of land in the middle of Lake Washington. Have you ever heard of Redmond? Sure you have - Redmond is the global headquarters of Microsoft, the world's least-loved buggy software manufacturer. Anyway, Redmond is a short drive east across a bridge then north from Mercer Island. Which means it's home to a lot of Microsofties and those fortunate enough to provide services and supplies for Bill Gates and co. One of these service providers is my co-host, Eva, several years ago a co-worker at the Prague Post. At the time, she had the unenviable grunt job of translating for the Czech linguistically-challenged journalists like Your Correspondent. She's moved pretty far up the ladder - she's now making quite an effort as one of the legion of PR execs handling the Big M. Which must be quite a challenge; Microsoft has never worried or cared much for the kind of press they get. Maybe Eva will help change that.

Mercer Island was a pleasant, coastal and comfortable place to be based in. I did like the Eastside of the city, but an overnight west across the water was a lot of fun too. More about that in the next entry; stay tuned, sailors.