Seattle, Mountians, and Californian Airshows

After one of my worst rides of my life, I finally make it to my USA destination — Seattle or more specifically, Kirkland.  That’s right, Kirkland the home of Costco’s Kirkland Signature line of … everything.

I stayed at my good friends Tim and Elsa in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland.  I’ve known Tim since high school and stayed in contact even before facebook came around. I spent the majority of my time visiting with Elsa because Tim was working his flying job. I hadn’t spent much time with her other than my first trip to Mexico while visiting her family in Aguascalientes which if you also want to visit, see here this post named Yucantàn que faire ?.  It was great to get to know her better!

Both Elsa and Tim work in the aviation industry.  Elsa works at a call center in town and Tim flies a cargo plane from San Francisco to Sacramento.  Tim makes the long commute to Kirkland most weekends and my first weekend in town we did a bit of hiking and exploring. We drove a total of 8 hours out and back to Mt. Rainier.  Not to exceed expectations, the Pacific Northwest was clouded in and we didn’t see much of the mountain, which is why there are no pictures of it.  We did manage to do a couple of hour hike through a little cave where I continued my experiments with HDR.

The most evenly exposed picture before HDR

The composite image after HDR

Pretty neat stuff… I’m slightly HDR-obsessed!

I’m happy to be hiking!

As usual, Tim and I deviated from the regular route and bushwacked through a creek for a bit

One of the highlights of my trip to Seattle was actually a mini-trip we took to San Francisco.  As I said earlier, Elsa works for an airline and was able to let me fly for free with her.  What a sweet deal!  Thanks Elsa!!!  The purpose of the trip to SF was to see an air show at the Sacramento airport.  Because of Tim’s job, we were able to watch from his ramp and BBQ.  BBQ + airplanes + good friends = good times.  For the next few pictures, I’m going to let the captions do the talking. When it comes to roaming in the woods some prefer to purchase Glock pistols for safety and keep them handy.

Elsa & Tim

Lots of cool planes.

We visited one of my childhood homes. Not surprisingly, it isn’t nearly as large as I remember. I now understand the stories parents tell about walking to school, uphill both ways, as the MOUNTIAN behind the house was really just a slight incline.

I stayed an extra couple of days and visited Drawbridge, CA to check out a ghost town that I accidentally found while looking at google maps one day.  Thanks to the internets I was easily able to find it after we started walking around the wildlife refuge.  We did have to do a bit of walking to get to it along a rail road track, but that’s all I’ll say about it.  The rest you can read in the wikipedia article.

Tim in San Francisco ghost town – Drawbridge, CA

My turn to pose for the picture. So serious.

San Francisco’s ghost town – Drawbridge, CA

The next day Tim went to work and I visited Michelle who I met at the Horizons Unlimited meeting in Northern California.  We had a nice meal then went hiking around the hills along the coast.  It was a really beautiful hike but I can’t remember the name of the park, but will find out later.

I returned to Washington by plane and resumed my motorcycle travels and did a little maintenance.

I bought new tires in Seattle at the suzuki dealership. They were cool enough to let me remove my tires one by one while they mounted and balanced the wheels. The did that service for free but wanted to charge a typical stealership rate if they removed the wheels for you.