From Little Washington to Big Washington!!

This is the point in our trip where we are finally turning around and heading east! It's just seems so crazy that we are in Washington state and all of Em's fam is in Washington, NC across the entire country!

Today was a long day of driving from Chico, CA to Seattle. Oregon is beautiful to drive through. Oregon Trail as a childhood computer game anyone???

We hit mile 5,000 today!!!!! With that feat also came the necessity of an oil change for Mitch. So we stopped in Portland and ate at the subway in Wal-Mart and read about the Jon and Kate Plus Eight scandal is US Weekly while waiting for Mitch. Sadly, no Tammy episodes. All we could get out of the Portland Wal-Mart was a short verbal altercation between two high school girls about a boy (I think...I was trying hard to eavesdrop as a munched on my veggie sub and chips...Emily was too wrapped up in Us Weekly). I guess Tammy was a rare gem.

We FINALLY got to Seattle about 7:30, though it took me like 20 minutes to find our friend's apartment even though the whole time I was literally 500 feet from it. Oh Seattle and your skinny little parallel and forking roads!

Our Castaway buddy Julio picked us up from where we are staying and we headed over the Pike Place Market (though everything was shut down for the night). I also met up with my friend from back home Joy!! who moved out here a couple years ago and her boyfriend Kyle who we know from Castaway as well. It's a small world.

We walked around a bit, walked into the FIRST Starbucks ever!! Then headed towards the Pike Place market area (where they throw the fish) to eat at Iver's. We walk into the restaurant and everything looks really fancy. We were seated next to window with a beautiful view of the pier and the water. I was a little surprised that my friends brought us here (I mean they all work for Young Life) because looking at menu things were way expensive. I love seafood, but in my head I was thinking I don't love seafood this much. As I glanced up from such astronomical figures on the menu, I could just tell no one wanted to be there and pay that much....so we just up and left in a rapid manner while the hostess wasn't looking. 

We went outside and realized that the Iver's my friends are used to is the Fish Bar beside the fancy restaurant...we just didn't see it at first! Oh what a relief! Ivar's is a fastfood fish and chips types place. They also have a couple kinds of clam chowder, including a red kind that Emily and I both got in sourdough bread bowls. Yummy and much more wallet friendly. Oh, and we ate outside and the picnic tables directly below where we were in the fancy restaurant. I guess you can consider it the peasant section.

Then it was SPACE NEEDLE TIME!! None of our friends had ever actually gone up in it (and Kyle has lived here his whole life!) so it was a first for us all. It was incredible seeing the city at night. Definitely worth it!!

The last thing we did was ride by this giant concrete troll that is under a bridge. It's creepy, but funny.

Our camera batteries are dead so we couldn't upload pics from today, so we will add them to this post tomorrow sometime.