Sleepless in Seattle

It was a relief to get to Seattle, the ride had been longer and harder than I anticipated. Arriving into city-limits was always going to be stressful due to the increased traffic. Thankfully I pulled over at a bike-shop to seek counsel in terms of the best-route into town. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a bike-map so that I could bike the last 25 miles into the city on bike-friendly routes. This was my first introduction to the Seattle bike scene, which I was not aware of at all. I got to explore the bike network around Seattle even further as an old foe from my triathlon days had invited me around to dinner. I just about had the legs to bike the extra twenty miles to the nearby city/suburb of Microsoft ... eh, I mean Redmond. This meant that I biked forty five miles on bike-paths though the city - quite incredible. The return trip took me along the Burke-Gilman trail which is a bike path that runs by Lake Washington and through various parks along the route. I was as impressed with the ability to be able to bike so many miles through a city on traffic free paths as I was with the amount of roadies I met along the route. It turns out Seattle has one of the biggest 'road-bike scenes' in the US.

I knew very little about Seattle before arriving there save for the corporations that are based there, the coffee scene, the fact that it was considered the home of the grunge music scene in the nineties and that the city is heavily represented across the major leagues: the Seattle Mariners (baseball), the Seattle Sounders (soccer) and the Seattle Seahawks (football) are all based downtown. Their NBA (Seattle Supersonics) franchise was bought by Oklahoma in 2008 due to a disagreement between the Sonics and the city.

I was caught totally unawares by the huge port on the way in. Seattle's location on a map does not suggest that it would be a big port location as large ships have to navigate a narrow channel north of the Olympic Peninsula and there are plenty of islands nearby. It is in fact a massive container port (mostly Chinese containers of course) and also a docking point for massive cruise ships. Typically these large vessels collect local captains on entry to the Puget Sound. These local mariners guide foreign ships through the sound with their local knowledge.

The downtown area is not too big, however, the city sprawls across bridges and waterways giving the metropolitan area quite a big feel. Big cities make for lots of traffic and while they have done a superb job with their bike-route network it makes for a long commute to other parts of the Seattle area. Still, the location is pretty great. They are a short ferry ride to the Olympic peninsula whose long mountain-range provides nice views from the city. On the Eastern side there is Mount Rainier National Park and there are ski-fields nearby in the Cascade range.

It took me five full days to explore the place and it made for a very photogenic city. I particularly enjoyed visiting the downtown public library, which was reconstructed in 2003. This is a landmark piece of architecture by the unconventional Rem Koolhaas. It is symbolic of how liberal the city is as the building strays far from the normal notion that libraries should be stuffy. It has become somewhat of a 'civic-centre' because the city can't afford the cost of building and maintaining a proper one. Like San Francisco, Seattle is a sanctuary city and the homeless tend to hang out in the library during opening hours as they have nowhere else to go. The consequence of this is that the library is unfortunately not wholly embraced by the tax-payers who paid for it.

Seattle is a very impressive city full of outdoorsy people who take full advantage of the lakes and mountains that surround it. Compared to its neighbour Portland, the city is refreshingly diverse and far from sleepy. Its reputation for inclement weather is a little overstated but the cafe and pub scene make for nice places to hang-out indoors whenever the weather does turn sour. The diversity of its inhabitants is best explored through the neighbourhoods that surround the downtown area. These precincts feel like little villages and prevent what is in fact a large city from ever feeling overwhelming.

There are a couple of photo-sets up in the gallery.

Mind how you go

Marco