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alstravelblog · 7 years ago

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World Trip 2014 - Part 4

've been here a month already. Four bloody weeks. It feels like only yesterday my friends were forcing a line of shots down me while I tried to say I had too much packing to do to get that drunk. Anyway, this week had a bit less train travel and a bit more city-hopping.

My first evening in Seattle was spent at the airport, learning that Jonny's luggage had probably been stolen. We were so keen to get to the pub that we pretty much brushed it off as 'one of those things' but, looking back, it's not that great. He had his best clothes in there, apparently, and now they're gone due to Seattle airport's publicly-accessible baggage carousels. The tossers.

So then, Pike Place Market. It's the big crazy market near the waterfront of Seattle - Stephen Fry went there in his documentary about the U.S., it's so famous - and our hostel happened to be over the road. You could buy all sorts there: peanut butter and jelly bagels, comic books, supposedly original TV scripts for shows like Doctor Who and Firefly, leather-bound journals (of which Jonny bought one), artwork, and a hell of a lot of fish. The fishmongers seemed to love their job, as every few minutes they shouted "we got another tip!" and cheered. We wandered over to the Space Needle, Seattle's most famous building, but decided not to pay the $22 to go up as it was pretty cloudy. Instead, we ate lunch in a renovated armoury and then wandered round the Pacific Science Centre - a cool museum containing things like robotic dinosaurs, laser shows, a butterfly house, and a colony of naked mole rats blindly climbing on top of each other.

After getting a beer buzz on at the Cheesecake Factory downtown, we had some free spaghetti at the hostel and then set out on a pub crawl. The second bar was full of transvestites, and I got hit on by a bloke called Ernesto whose brother is apparently running for mayor of Miami. Other highlights included an underground bar believed to be the last place Kurt Cobain was seen in public, which had a big projector showing videos of monkeys riding sheepdogs which were herding sheep; me and Jonny got to bust out our signature dance move in a dance club whilst incredibly drunk (it involves miming rope); and on the walk home, the hostel guide played music from his backpack, so we just danced home through the streets of Seattle like idiots to the Cha Cha Slide.

After seeing the quirkier parts of Seattle, including a giant troll under a bridge, and an underground tour of the old city, we caught the bus northward for a spontaneous trip to Vancouver (mainly because we couldn't find accommodation in Oregon for the weekend). It turns out this was a great decision. Vancouver is awesome, especially if you like your cities merged with forests, lakes and mountains. Arriving in the evening, we walked down by the harbour and into the first casino we saw - where we drank whisky and gambled some of Jonny's money away at the blackjack and roulette tables. On our way home, we dropped in to a noisy pub to sit at the bar, drink a pitcher of beer, and watch ice hockey like true Canadians. We got chatting to folk sat near us, and ended the night walking through the city centre rammed with thousands of hockey fans, while our new friend Melissa told us the best sights in the city to visit and shared some of the local plant life with us. Sorry Mum.

The next day we took a ferry and a bus to a big old gorge just next to the city (one of Vancouver's suburbs is actually built around it, it's amazing) and crossed a suspension bridge that just kept on swinging over the river. As the rain came in, we rented bikes and those really embarrassing waterproof ponchos and went cycling round the sea wall of Stanley Park - 7km of lighthouses, boats, forests and beaches. We stopped off at a restaurant for a drink and the concierge asked if he could take our coats, but I didn't want to hand over my poncho in such a fancy place so I just stuffed it in my bike helmet and sat by the fire. And so ended my brief stay in Canada.

Another bus ride later (and another scary trip through customs) and we reached Portland, Oregon, known for being a weird, kooky city. There's not much to say about this place that'll blow your minds, it's just full of young people with beards and moustaches, and parks filled with stretchy folks doing gymnastics during the day instead of working. Me and John, as he likes to introduce himself here, drank lots of local ales, ate lots of Cajun tatertots and wandered around the massive late night book shops Portland has. We even caught a book- reading by a semi-famous author whose book has become a big show in America (Resurrection, for those interested). After a failed attempt at renting a car with a girl named Maria we met at the hostel to visit a local national park, we proceeded to drink more beer and watch Gone Girl at the vintage cinema near our hostel. We must have done something right, because our waiter gave us free tickets and the cinema had alcohol and reclining chairs. The film, however, is totally messed up and weird, which didn't mellow us out as much. Still good, though.

The three of us decided to road trip it to California, so that's what comes next week, folks..

#travel worldtrip

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