Weekend Trip Report
Jul. 11th, 2004 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuWe're back from a family trip to Seattle.
We took off Friday after work, just me,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snippy and Twoson. Stopped at Popeyes for a dinner of chicken strips (them) or catfish (me), with mashed potatoes (them), cajun rice (me) and a biscuit. Yum. Then we hit the road again.
The drive up was long, but not horrible. I expected horrible, frankly. My mental image of the roads from Olympia to Seattle is endless gridlock 24/7. Not true, but.... We got to our hotel, a Holiday Inn Express we stayed in the last time we went up. It's only a couple of blocks from Seattle Center and the Space Needle, it's fairly inexpensive, clean and they serve a free limited breakfast buffet every morning. We got in late, checked in, went to sleep (or they did; I hung out in the lobby reading til near 1 a.m., nightowl that I am).
Saturday we got up, had breakfast and walked over to visit the Science Fiction Museum. It was quite entertaining. Lots of props from sci fi movies and television shows, as well as scripts, costumes, models and so forth). The Hall of Fame had an interactive touchscreen that gave you the scoop on the various people inducted therein. There's a section devoted to fandom and fanzines, another to a timeline of science fiction, another to classic novels of various sorts (alternate histories, uptopian/dystopian fiction, etc.). When you enter the museum there's a big globe (six feet or more across) displaying a repeating film over it's entire surface. Snippy tells me they had a heck of a time getting that to work properly and I can believe it.
I was interested to note--not for the first time--while looking at the many props on display, just how cheezy most of them looked, and how much better they looked onscreen. What looks slick, polished and futuristic on television or on the movie screen is instantly recognizable as a cheaply made fake when you see it with your own eyeballs. Movie magic, indeed.
On the other hand, the wall-sized display from the interior of a space station where various recognizable spacescraft come into and move out of view was terrific. It too had an interactive display that identified the various ships, gave their statistics and played a little video clip showing the ship in action, with voiceover narration. Among the ships was the (TOS) Enterprise, a Star Destroyer, Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Millennium Falcon, Moya, the Cowboy Bebop ship, Red Dwarf, Rama, Dr. Zarkov's rocketship and the Planet Express Delivery Ship. I was surprised to see no Battlestar Galactica, though.
After visiting the museum we had lunch at the Crab Pot (Twoson loves crab). Then we dropped Twoson off at Gamewerks for a while (Snippy and I both went shopping--separately--while he played games). I bought a present for Snippy's upcoming birthday. We went back to the hotel afterward to rest. We eventually ordered a pizza for Twoson and Snippy and I drove out to the Spaghetti Factory, where we found the parking lot choked with cars and the parking lot and interior choked with people waiting for a table (45 minute to an hour).
Screw that. We returned to a small restaurant, the Emerald Grill, located in the Holiday Inn (not the Express we stayed in) across the alley from our hotel. It turned out to be far better food than we expected, assnippy details in her livejournal. We were very impressed and she wrote a glowing endorsement on a comment card.
Today we got up, checked out, and went back to the Emerald Grill for a breakfast buffet. It was fairly standard buffet fare (scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, potatos, cereal, bagels, etc.) But the quality of the food was wonderful, far better than average. After that we left Seattle and stopped to spend a few hours at Enchanted Village (a water/amusement park). Then the long drive home, made worse by an endless parade of morons who apparently believe that it is their god-given right to block the far left fast lane if they're moving even marginally faster than the speed limit. It was like that all the way back to Portland.
I slept pretty well during our stay in Seattle. I had a long and involved dream Sunday morning of being among a large group of people take captive by terrorists. Fortunately, it being one of my lucid dreams, I realized I could manipulate the flow of time. So I did, allowing me to oh-so-slowly-but-way-faster-than-anyone-else, drive a pencil into one bad guy's eye, snatch his firearm away from him and then use it to kill another, and another, and work my way thru the whole gang of them. Victory through reality-manipulating superpowers! Take that, Neo!
We took off Friday after work, just me,
snippy and Twoson. Stopped at Popeyes for a dinner of chicken strips (them) or catfish (me), with mashed potatoes (them), cajun rice (me) and a biscuit. Yum. Then we hit the road again.The drive up was long, but not horrible. I expected horrible, frankly. My mental image of the roads from Olympia to Seattle is endless gridlock 24/7. Not true, but.... We got to our hotel, a Holiday Inn Express we stayed in the last time we went up. It's only a couple of blocks from Seattle Center and the Space Needle, it's fairly inexpensive, clean and they serve a free limited breakfast buffet every morning. We got in late, checked in, went to sleep (or they did; I hung out in the lobby reading til near 1 a.m., nightowl that I am).
Saturday we got up, had breakfast and walked over to visit the Science Fiction Museum. It was quite entertaining. Lots of props from sci fi movies and television shows, as well as scripts, costumes, models and so forth). The Hall of Fame had an interactive touchscreen that gave you the scoop on the various people inducted therein. There's a section devoted to fandom and fanzines, another to a timeline of science fiction, another to classic novels of various sorts (alternate histories, uptopian/dystopian fiction, etc.). When you enter the museum there's a big globe (six feet or more across) displaying a repeating film over it's entire surface. Snippy tells me they had a heck of a time getting that to work properly and I can believe it.
I was interested to note--not for the first time--while looking at the many props on display, just how cheezy most of them looked, and how much better they looked onscreen. What looks slick, polished and futuristic on television or on the movie screen is instantly recognizable as a cheaply made fake when you see it with your own eyeballs. Movie magic, indeed.
On the other hand, the wall-sized display from the interior of a space station where various recognizable spacescraft come into and move out of view was terrific. It too had an interactive display that identified the various ships, gave their statistics and played a little video clip showing the ship in action, with voiceover narration. Among the ships was the (TOS) Enterprise, a Star Destroyer, Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Millennium Falcon, Moya, the Cowboy Bebop ship, Red Dwarf, Rama, Dr. Zarkov's rocketship and the Planet Express Delivery Ship. I was surprised to see no Battlestar Galactica, though.
After visiting the museum we had lunch at the Crab Pot (Twoson loves crab). Then we dropped Twoson off at Gamewerks for a while (Snippy and I both went shopping--separately--while he played games). I bought a present for Snippy's upcoming birthday. We went back to the hotel afterward to rest. We eventually ordered a pizza for Twoson and Snippy and I drove out to the Spaghetti Factory, where we found the parking lot choked with cars and the parking lot and interior choked with people waiting for a table (45 minute to an hour).
Screw that. We returned to a small restaurant, the Emerald Grill, located in the Holiday Inn (not the Express we stayed in) across the alley from our hotel. It turned out to be far better food than we expected, as
snippy details in her livejournal. We were very impressed and she wrote a glowing endorsement on a comment card.Today we got up, checked out, and went back to the Emerald Grill for a breakfast buffet. It was fairly standard buffet fare (scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, potatos, cereal, bagels, etc.) But the quality of the food was wonderful, far better than average. After that we left Seattle and stopped to spend a few hours at Enchanted Village (a water/amusement park). Then the long drive home, made worse by an endless parade of morons who apparently believe that it is their god-given right to block the far left fast lane if they're moving even marginally faster than the speed limit. It was like that all the way back to Portland.
I slept pretty well during our stay in Seattle. I had a long and involved dream Sunday morning of being among a large group of people take captive by terrorists. Fortunately, it being one of my lucid dreams, I realized I could manipulate the flow of time. So I did, allowing me to oh-so-slowly-but-way-faster-than-anyone-else, drive a pencil into one bad guy's eye, snatch his firearm away from him and then use it to kill another, and another, and work my way thru the whole gang of them. Victory through reality-manipulating superpowers! Take that, Neo!
