Hellos and Goodbyes

Hello,
It is Friday September 10th and I'm in Centralia, Washington.

We arrived in Seattle on Thursday night at Alex's amazing friends, Arica and Mike's house. We were greeted with unbelievable hospitality, good conversation, good food, a hot tub and a real bed. Bliss. The rest of the weekend the four of us split up to do our own things. I had a great time hanging in Seattle - especially since my boyfriend Spencer flew out for the long weekend. We enjoyed every minute of our touristy time - Pike's market, the underground Seattle tour, and eating a whole lot of seafood.

After the weekend we had to say farewell to Katie Wharton who returned to her job in New York. It was a pleasure having Katie on the trip as she always brought great conversation starting questions to every meal and just a wonderful attitude to everything.

Over the weekend, we also met our new bike tourer - K.C. She is a friend of Nina's and is going to ride from Seattle to San Francisco with us. K.C. easily fit into our group with her California laid back style and her excessive knowledge of plants.

We immediately noticed a difference upon biking south out of Seattle. Contrasting north of Seattle vs. South of Seattle...lunchtime food in the north was typically tofu scramble vs. chicken fried steak in the south. Bumper stickers changed from "Election 2004, End of an Error" to "Bush/Cheney 2004". (Yeah, I've noticed that the republicans haven't been as creative with their election paraphanelia slogans). And beer of choice (judging from the bottles and cans on the side of the road) changed from any Northwest micro brew to Busch and Busch Lite.

But the scenary is still spectacular. There are so many different kinds of fir trees - my favorite is the one where it looks like a normal size christmas tree stuck on top of a 30 foot high pole. Everything smells so clean and is just so green...well, of course it's green - it rains every day.

We biked into Centralia yesterday lured by the library and the possibility of staying at a 100 year old hotel/pub/movie theater. It exceeded our expectations with it's huge Tiffany glass chandaliers, train robber legends, and logging day pictures everywhere. You can check it out herehttp://www.thegrandlodge.com/index.php?loc=42&category=Location%20Homepage Once we found out that the movie of friday was Raiders of the Lost Ark we decided to spend the day here. I've particulary enjoyed reading about the local history (this town was founded by an African American man in the late 1800's, and there was a Centralia Massacre in 1919 that caused us all to brush up on our labor union history) and walking around town (the best flyer was an advertisement for the Washington Wrestling "September to Remember" brawl featuring The Orginal (sic) Doink the Clown vs. Mr. Beefy Goodness Vance Nevada. Unfortunately we won't be around on September 17th to see the smack down).
cheers,
leigh