Nostalgia Tripping

August was a scrambled-up month for me. It seemed I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen, for replies to messages, checks in the mail, meetings and dates, and run-around errands. In the middle of the month I took a week-long trip to Seattle to meet up with my sister and her family, and revisit some of my favorite places.

For many years I've often found myself thinking of places I've been, and felt an impulse to go back, just to be there and see the place again. When I was in college in Seattle I used to spend whole days on the weekend, taking the bus to some neighborhood across town, then walking at random around the business and residential blocks. My favorite bus route was the #43, which ran from the Central District to Downtown, up Pike Street and along Broadway on Capitol Hill, through Roanoke to the University District, up 45th Street through Wallingford, past the Woodland Park Zoo and Phinney Ridge, down to Ballard, then out to Shilshole and Golden Gardens. I think it still takes mostly the same route, and it's a great tour of the city if you have a week or ten days to explore all the destinations along the way.

Now that I've taken up bicycling I find myself following the same impulse. Sometimes I recall a certain stretch of road, not any particular destination, but I want to get out on my bike just to see the seasonal changes in the light, the trees and understory, the sounds of birds and animals, the small farms and gardens along the roadside. And more often recently, the road construction or home building projects, or disturbances from landslides or flooding.

Maybe this is a remnant of some migratory urge left over from our semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer days. Still, I did find it very disorienting and tiring being away from my Bellingham-to-Ferndale routines. Every day around 5:00pm, when I was out and around in Seattle, I'd begin to feel it was about time to head back to my hotel - a Ferndale habit, because if I'm out without my bike I need to watch the time and make sure I can make bus connections to get back to the Cordata transit center in time to catch the last bus home.

This trip was another excursion when I rode my bike to Fairhaven, then left it parked at the Amtrak station. I considered biking part or all of the way to Seattle, but decided to conserve my energy for visiting and walking tours. Besides, I suspect my family thinks this bicycle fixation of mine has gone on a bit too long. My car on the Amtrak Cascades train was about half-filled with summer travelers, mostly single, middle-aged (or older) women riding from Vancouver BC to Seattle or Portland. I got stuck with an aisle seat, but all the way my head was swiveling from water views on the right, to showplace house views on the left.

My sister and her husband and college-age daughter stayed at a Holiday Inn near the Seattle Center, a convenient central location for them, but I remembered that area being part of the seedy drugs-and-prostitution strip (it's improved now), so I chose to stay at The College Inn, in the University District.  The College Inn Pub and Cafe was a traditional cool graduate-student hangout when I was a mousy undergrad, and I was too timid to go inside, but now I'm past caring. At street level now is a Thai restaurant, a pub, and a coffee shop and convenience store, with a small but expensive grocery/convenience store across the street. In mid-August, during the last week of summer quarter, it was very quiet and private, but I'm told during the school year, when the Huskies have football or basketball games, it turns very loud and rowdy, just like the rest of the neighborhood.

The College Inn is a one-hundred-twenty year old Tudor style building, built around the same time as some of the first University of Washington buildings, for the Alaska-Yukon Exhibition. It's billed as a "euro-style" hotel, meaning you get a sink in your room, with men's and women's showers and bathrooms down the hall on each floor. There's no air conditioning, but my room was comfortable enough with the ceiling fan on and windows open a few inches at night. There's a nice, light, free continental breakfast in the fourth floor lounge from 7-9am. The hallways are a gallery of fascinating historic photos of early Seattle, showing the early stages of digging the Montlake Cut between Lake Union and Lake Washington, and the Ship Canal that connected Lake Union and Puget Sound when the Ballard Locks were built.

A little sight-seeing around the University of Washington campus.

The HUB lawn became a favorite resting place for weary students in the 1970's, when student activists demanded the right to walk, lounge and play frisbee on the grass.

Relic in the basement of Denny Hall

The Quad Buildings - grotesques, not gargoyles. This is either Savery or Smith Hall, I forget.

There is a student bike shop in the HUB (Husky Union Building), and covered bike lockers for rent on campus, as well as open bike racks. This one offers a repair station with a tire pump and assorted tools.











After you cross 47th Street on University Avenue (The Ave), there are a few blocks that get a bit dodgy, with aggressive pan-handlers and hustlers, then the street-life settles down a bit and becomes a bit shabby but more genteel.

A neighborhood bike shop

University Heights Elementary School, which was shut down and turned into a community center in the 1980's. It's going through another round of rehabilitation now.