Posts In The “North Puget Sound” Category
Jennifer loves to get pictures with team mascots and recently added another to the list with Blitz of the Seattle Seahawks at the team’s 2023 NFL Draft Party. The event was held at the Space Needle with guest appearances from several players as the 2023 NFL draft was broadcast. The party was fantastic, made even…
The Seattle Kraken, in an impressive and unexpected feat, reached the Stanley Cup playoffs in only their second year of existence. We unfortunately were playing the defending champions, the Colorado Avalanche, and our prospects weren’t great. But the team continued to over-achieve and ultimately won the series 4-3. This gave us three historic first-ever NHL…
The Timeshifter app helps battle jet lag by shifting time zones over the course of multiple days rather than all at once. It also optionally suggests taking melatonin and consuming or avoiding caffeine at certain times to further improve the change in sleep times. On the recommendation of a co-worker, James tried it for the…
James made another trip to the Bay area two days after the previous one, and we both ended up having Italian food for dinner, ableit in different cities. While James was at Perbacco Italian restaurant in San Francisco, Jennifer tried the Red Hen Rigatoni recipe, reproduced in the Washington Post. This was the meal that…
Spring arrived in Seattle in March, with daffodils in bloom, and weather warm enough to eat outside. But winter was definitely still in force in the Cascade Mountains, where we made a couple of snowshoe trips and enjoyed the snowy scenery. James made several business trips this month, starting off in Denver, then to the…
The Cirque du Soleil show Corteo came to Climate Pledge Arena this year, and we somehow managed to snag last-minute front-row seats. The show is about a clown, Mauro, who imagines his own funeral procession and is told in typical Cirque du Soleil fashion through skilled acrobats dressed in fantastic costumes. We had an excellent…
February was even colder than January, with Seattle setting a record low temperature for Feb 24th of 22°F (-5.5°C) and fountains and ponds freezing up throughout the city. We started the month at the Seattle Boat Show, where we presented a seminar on our the trip around the world and checked out some of the…
January was unseasonably cold for Seattle. The temperature fell as low as 27°F (-2.7° C), about 10°F (5.4°C) below average for this time of year, and several winter storms passed through. Except for a quick long weekend in Honolulu, we spent much of the month closer to home trying new restaurants and returning to old…
We had a busy two weeks before our Antarctic cruise, where James was away on business for three days and we attended a Seattle Kraken hockey game and two Seattle Seahawks football games. The second football game, two days before we departed for Argentina, was even more exciting than normal. Amazon Prime Video has exclusive…
The Georgetown Steam Plant was built in 1906 along the Duwamish River to power Seattle’s streetcars. The advent of hydropower soon made the plant noncompetitive, and it was used only as an emergency backup starting in the 1920s. Decommissioned in 1977 and declared a National Historic Monument in 1984, the plant houses the only two…
Autumn is fresh hop beer season in the Pacific Northwest. Most beer is made from dried hops, while fresh hop beers are made from hops that have never been dried. The beer must be brewed very soon after the hops are ripe, so can’t be made very far from the fields. Since over 77% of…
September was warmer than usual for Seattle, with the temperature frequently above 80°F (27° C) even late in the month, more than 10 degrees above average. The warm, clear, and dry weather was ideal for camping and we made two multi-night trips. The first was a three-night stop in Gifford Pinchot National Forest with a…
The Seattle Seahawks opened their season with a Monday Night Football home game against the Denver Broncos. Making the game even more exciting, this was the first where quarterback Russell Wilson was playing against the Seahawks rather than for them. The Seahawks won in an exciting and closely-contested match that we were expected to lose,…
Portland, Oregon is a major craft beer center full of many excellent pubs. We’d last visited in 2012 on our Columbia River trip in Dirona and recently decided to make a quick overnight trip by train from Seattle. We booked a cabin on the Starlight Express train, a 35-hour overnight train from Seattle to Los…
With generally clear skies, warm weather, and wildflowers in bloom, August is an excellent month to hike in the Cascade Mountains. And hike we did. Early in the month, we returned to Mt. Rainier for three fabulous days of summer hiking. The trails were bursting in color during the short wildflower season and “The Mountain”…
The rest of the month following our return from Switzerland was a busy one for construction in our area. Progress continued at the Fourth & Bell construction site directly west of our apartment. We were particularly interested to watch a small mobile crane build a larger mobile crane, pictured above, that eventually would assemble the…
Earlier this year we decided to replace boat exploration with SUV exploration and wilderness camping. But, as with moving back Seattle in the first place, we were pretty much starting from scratch with camping gear. Besides the Engel HD30 cooler that we’d purchased for our road trip across the country, everything else had to be…
Snowshoeing didn’t initially appeal to us as a winter sport. The gear seemed cumbersome, and our perception was that we’d be mostly walking along level ground through snowy woods or meadows. While we enjoy winter scenery, that just didn’t strike us as very exciting. We had wanted to do more winter hiking, but were finding…