Wednesday, July 29th:
We’re off! My sister Ingrid and I take the subway to Grand
Central Station, then catch a shuttle bus to the Newark airport. Before our flight, we eat
breakfast in our terminal. Our waiter tries to subtly warn me away from the
Berry Brioche French Toast (“Just so you know, there are no real berries in
it”), but I fail to take the hint. Rookie mistake: it’s ghastly. But at least
it’s expensive. Virgin America doesn’t fly directly to Seattle ,
so we have a layover in San Francisco .
Carne asada tacos at SFO help ease the memory of the French toast. Ah, California , where even
the airports serve excellent tacos. You are truly a magical land. How I’ve
missed you.
I’ve brought my Kindle, loaded with fiction. On the flight, I
read The Maltese Falcon, because I’ve
been on an old-timey detective novel kick lately, and William Gibson’s creepy,
strange, bleak, evocative new sci-fi book, The
Peripheral. The Peripheral gets a weird lock on my brain and continues to
haunt me throughout our entire trip.
Upon arrival at SeaTac, we hop the light rail to downtown Seattle , then walk to our
hotel. For the first two nights, we’re booked at our old standby, The Moore.
The Moore used
to be a semi-secret gem: cheap, clean, quirky rooms in a cool historic building
mere blocks from the center of downtown. This time, it’s a bit of a
disappointment—they raised the rates! they no longer fold the guest towels into
swan shapes!—but it’s still a perfectly pleasant place to stay. It’s also teeming
with uniformed sailors: There are two large Navy ships and a Coast Guard ship
docked down at the waterfront, and as near as we can tell, everyone with shore
leave is staying at The Moore.
We dine at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Anthony Bordain scoffs
at the place, true, but this is in our blood: The Spokane offshoot was an
important fixture of our childhood restaurant experience. Just the sight of the
tasseled lampshades and the brick walls and the high-backed armchairs makes me
swoon with nostalgia.
Thursday, July 30th:
We walk too far along a too-hot stretch of Elliott Avenue in
search of a Taco Time. Our love of Taco Time is well documented, but nostalgia
fails us here. Lunch falls firmly in the category of “ungood.”
After more wandering around the city—the Sculpture Garden ,
Pike Place Market—we share small plates and drink big glasses of wine at the Virginia Inn
Friday, July 31st:
After a morning of wandering around Capitol Hill (a name
that always kind of throws me for a loop—I mean, Seattle knows it’s not the state
capital and hence has no Capitol building, right?), we check out of The Moore
and catch a commuter bus to downtown Tacoma. After the noise and crowds of Seattle , Tacoma
is a lovely oasis of calm. Neither of us have been here before, so we spend
some time exploring. We lose our hearts to Tacoma , which seems quirky and cool and
interesting. It’s hot and bright here, too, so we hole up inside a cavernous
dark coffeehouse with tall glasses of iced coffee.
We’re staying at the Hotel Murano. It’s ritzy! It’s also
hosting a child beauty pageant, which means the lobby is filled with swarms of young
girls in tiaras and spangle-covered bathing suits. Our room, which is on the
twenty-fifth floor, has a panoramic view of
the city, with Mount Rainier rising up
gracefully in the background. We have lunch at the bar, where we conduct a
scientific sampling of the hotel’s array of signature artisanal cocktails.
The purpose of our visit: My childhood friend Julia is
getting married. We catch a taxi at the hotel. Our driver has never heard of
the venue, a Japanese-styled pagoda in a large park at the northern tip of the
city. Indeed, he seems inclined to doubt such a place exists, even after he
programs the street address into his GPS, but we manage to find it eventually.
The wedding is lovely. The bride and groom are beaming and
radiant. At the reception, we’re seated with a group of smart, lively
conversationalists, thank god. The guy seated next to me at our table is a Portland-based
working actor. He’s the dude with the erectile dysfunction in this Portlandia sketch:
Getting back to the hotel ends up being a bit gnarly. It’s
too far to walk in heels, and the city buses have stopped running, so we call
another taxi. The first cab company doesn’t answer their phone. The second
tells us it’ll be at least forty-five minutes before they can pick us up. The
third tells us it’ll be fifteen minutes, which stretches into an hour and a
half. Per Google Maps, it’s a hair over five miles from downtown Tacoma to the wedding venue.
We’re starting to suspect that taxis aren’t Tacoma ’s most burgeoning industry. Our cab
driver, when she finally arrives, is a total sweetheart, though she does
flummox us a bit when she asks us, in all earnestness, if we’d like to take the
direct way or the scenic route along the waterfront back to our hotel. With a
glance at the running meter, we tell her the direct route will be fine.
Saturday, August 1st:
We walk to Tacoma ’s Greyhound
station and board a bus for Portland .
We haven’t been to Portland
since… 1997? Something like that. We’re staying with our cousin Karl, who meets
us at the station. Even though we haven’t seen Karl in a decade, even though
this our first time meeting his wife and son, we fall into an easy, comfortable
groove. They are impeccable hosts during our stay. Beer and conversation flows
freely.
Karl works in CG at a commercial studio; he show us his
reel, which is loaded with cool projects we’ve seen dozens of time without ever
realizing he was part of the creative team behind them. Karl has a formidable
science fiction paperback collection and a great old house crammed with gadgets—dude,
he has an Oculus Rift! His teenaged son, who is a brilliant, blazing supernova
of a kid, shows us the drone he recently built from scratch, a quadrocopter
with a front-mounted camera, which he sails around the backyard. He’s amazing. Ten
years from now, he’s going to be ruling the world.
Sunday, August 2nd:
Our uncle Joe, dad’s younger brother, stops by to visit. The
last time we saw Joe was at dad’s funeral, which had been immediately preceded
by the long, grim, unfathomably sad weeks leading up to dad’s death, during
which we all shared in hospice care duties. It’s been three years since losing
dad, and almost seven years since losing mom, and Ingrid and I still feel
shell-shocked, crippled, stunted, wrecked. It’s really, really good to see Joe.
Every time I see him, I want to cling to him and never let him go.
Our cousin Erich, whom we haven’t seen in maybe eighteen years,
drops by for dinner. He and his fiancée arrive straight from a weekend-long
music festival, their bare feet covered in mud and scratches. They are awesome
and hilarious.
Monday, August 3rd:
Back to Seattle , this time
via a Bolt Bus from downtown Portland .
We meet up with Julia, the new bride, in Seattle ’s
International District and get caught up over sushi. Julia and I have known
each other since second grade in Spokane and
have kept in touch throughout our lives; for a time, she lived just down the
street from me in Los Angeles .
Since the last time we saw each other, she’s lost her father, and Ingrid and I
have lost both our parents. Growing old sucks.
We take the light rail to our SeaTac-adjacent hotel. In the
grand tradition of airport hotels, ours is a little dismal. It has a tiny
indoor pool, but it’s bursting at the seams with happy and rambunctious kids,
so we decide to pass on a swim. The room service menu fails to thrill, and we’re
starting to pick ridiculous fights with each other, so I head off on my own to
forage for dinner. Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, I manage to find decent
(okay, edible) French dip sandwiches and—wait for it—champagne at, uh, a
gas-station convenience store. We enjoy a fine, fine repast while watching Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie in our
hotel room.
We are secretly very pleased our vacation is drawing to a
close.
Tuesday, August 4th:
We catch an early-morning flight to Los
Angeles , then kill time at The
Worst Terminal At LAX waiting for our connecting flight to Newark . You know that
terminal—it’s the one with the Gladstones
and the Starbucks and the Burger King and precious little else, except for a
conspicuous lack of adequate seating for the vast hordes of grumpy and
exhausted passengers. I have spent half my life at that terminal. Seriously,
they could double the number of seats in that terminal, and I bet people would still have to stand. It’s terrible. We
hide out at Gladstones ,
eating good fish and nursing balloon goblets of wine, for as long as we humanly
can.
The gate beside ours is boarding a flight to JFK. The beautiful
and fabulous Retta—Donna on Parks &
Recreation—and the entire Special Olympics team from Puerto Rico are waiting for that flight. We sorely wish
we were on that flight, too.
Shortly after boarding, I somehow manage to sit on my
Kindle. It breaks. I immediately choose to interpret this as a grim omen, as
the last time I broke a Kindle was on the day our dad died. Our flight to Newark is punctuated by
deeply frightening bursts of turbulence. I remain about 25% convinced we’re
going to crash, right up until our unusually bumpy landing.
Our plan is to catch a direct shuttle bus from the airport to
Grand Central Station—hey, we’ve even prepaid for the tickets!—but no buses are
running, due to a fatal accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. After an hour of
waiting in vain, we pop a (metaphorical) Mentos and quickly change plans. We catch
the air train to the New Jersey Transit station, then take a train to Penn
Station. A couple of subway trains later, and we’re back at our apartment in Queens .
It was a wonderful trip, but it’s so, so good to be home.
All photos are courtesy of my sister, Ingrid Richter, who took a lot of pictures on her iphone while I huffed in impatience and made snotty comments about looking like tourists. Everything considered, it was mighty nice of her to let me use them here.
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