In early August we went for a visit to Seattle with our son Andrew. Andrew currently lives in San Francisco, but he used to live in Seattle and has a lot of friends there.
We wandered the city as tourists and saw weird signs on the streets, like this car wash sign from the 50’s.
This veterinarian encourages Heavy Petting.
When I first saw this sign I thought a restaurant was serving cooked cat on the menu, but thankfully the place turned out to be a Cat Café.
Susan was happy we went out for Dim Sum lunch. This statue was in the restaurant.
We had breakfast at a Starbucks Reserve Roastery a few blocks from our Airbnb. This was sort of a Mega Starbucks, with special stations to test exotic coffee blends. I thought the interior was quite interesting, with a pseudo-science décor.
Andrew pointed out all of the Amazon buildings; here is one of many.
We went past an Amazon Go Store, and Andrew decided to go in. He first had to download their phone app and sign into the app, and he could then use the phone app to get us past the turnstile at the entrance. Once inside, he pulled a bottle of vitamin water off the shelf; we looked around and then we walked out. No cashier or anything, but he got a notification from the app that he had purchased a bottle of vitamin water. I read about the technology behind Amazon Go, and it is fairly creepy. A bunch of cameras and sensors and artificial intelligence follow you around the store and figure out what you are purchasing. Of course, they have to identify each shopper. The whole technology is weird to me.
We met up with several of Andrew’s friends. This is Kate and her amazing daughter Claire, nearly one year old.
Andrew is on the right, and his friend Adam is on the left.
And finally, we had dinner with Andrew’s friends Kevin and Grace who live on Vashon Island, which is in Puget Sound but has no road bridges to the mainland. So Kevin flew his private plane over to Seattle where he picked the three of us up. I had been on small planes in Africa, but this plane was even smaller. Keven took off and then flew north to give us wonderful views of downtown Seattle.
He then flew across the sound and landed in the water, because this is a seaplane! It was a really fun ride!
Here is a photo Kevin after tying the plane to the dock, and a photo of his wife Grace.
As it got dark I got a couple of interesting photos of the plane and their dock.
Susan was a wee bit nervous about the flying, but she ended up really enjoying it. We did not fly back to Seattle at night. Instead, they drove us to the ferry terminal, and as pedestrians, we caught the ferry over to Seattle, and then took an Uber to our Airbnb.
We also visited the Chihuly Garden and Glass Exhibition in the Seattle Center, in the next blog post.