surviving the wilderness, december 19-21

so i've recently been reminded that i do indeed have a blog (noun) and i should should indeed blog (verb). here goes.

you may be wondering about the title of this particular post - it comes from a comment from kate, in passing, wishing us a good night and best wishes to "survive the wilderness... of (temporary) bedding and christmas foliage" in her living room. it seemed pretty appropriate for this trip - it is a bit of an adventure into the wilderness of my life until about 6 months ago.

so it's not that i'm really concerned about survival, exactly - i am so so happy to reconnect with friends i haven't seen in so many months! - but it does add a sense of the adventure that the past week, and this trip back east, has been. we all know about the ridiculous weather that seattle has been experiencing in the last week - ice and snow and ice and ice and snow and ice and snow and more snow and what do you mean you don't DE-ICE OR PLOW?! ahem - so there were some questions about whether i'd be able to get out of the city as planned. thankfully, my plane managed to squeak through between all of the storms - left seattle on time friday night, arrived an HOUR EARLY to JFK due to a ridiculous tailwind but after the bulk of friday's storm, sat on the tarmack for a bit while we waited for understaffed airline workers to load our bags, waited for clearance to leave, waited and circled for clearance to land at logan, and made it in only about an hour late saturday morning. you know, in the midst of the next round of snow. phew.

but i made it! josh and emma whisked me off to a lovely lunch in cambridge, then i hiked the red line back to dorchester to good ol' romsey street for some holiday cheer :) kate and david hosted a fabulous dinner party with friends and food and wine and monster cookies and dirty martinis and scattergories and late-night love, actually. it was pretty awesome. and ridiculously cute.

then, this morning, we treated ourselves to a wellesley brunch at zaftigs. oh, the potato pancakes. oh, the challah french toast. oh, so good.

after a bit of a wander around coolidge corner, i revisited cleveland circle to meet up with foodie buddy jon wong and josh and emma at cityside grill. josh tried to heckle steelers fans. i tried to discourage such behavior, not just because i have no ill-will toward steelers fans, but also because i happened to be between josh and said steelers fans. it was a dangerous position. but awesome to see jon and josh and emma again!

awesome to be back in boston in general, actually. and awesome to know that while, yes, this is known and familiar and i do love boston... this isn't my home anymore. it's a familiar wilderness, but it's not mine anymore. and that's ok.

welcome home, bean.

so, as of about saturday, october 18 - i am officially a resident of the state of washington. i have a license. i have registered to vote. i have a registered vehicle.

i have an apartment.



i have a kitten, callie.







(or, as she is sometimes known, booger.)




i am home :)

at the end of the rainbow...

(to celebrate and commemorate my new job, jen and JR whisk me to see pretty rainbows at snoqualmie falls.)

i almost forgot!

meet spike-o. he's a big flirt.

and my roommate. we share a bathroom, too.

he's pretty great.

(i did appreciate his body heat in bed much more in winter, though.)

my first weekend in seattle!

clearly, after unloading maddie, finding her an appropriate parking spot, and catching up with skratty and keith, it was TIME TO CELEBRATE!

bean has arrived!

oh, a note: now that i have arrived in seattle, i am now officially bean. when skratty and i lived in berkeley, i claimed to be the unnicknameable roommate and challenged sara (skratty) and kate (tool) to find a nickname for me. (it's true, i'm ridiculously hard to nickname.) sara decided on 00stringbean. later, bean. keith calls me beanus. it's pretty great.

anyway, for my first dinner as an official seattle-ite, we go to my faaaavorite brunch place in capitol hill - coastal kitchen. they have a rotating menu, and they just started veracruz this week - so, clearly, that means we must go. YES. much amazingness was consumed. mostly in the form of fish (shrimp for me, scallops for skratty), though keith was old school and went with the burger. all was fabulous.

after a brief detour to the airport to drop off skratty's dad, we continued our celebration at tini bigs, where the martinis are anything but teensy. mmmm. skratty and i do like our martinis.

skratty decided to try the jello-tini. it was jellolicious.


i think i'm wearing keith's glasses.


we look less crazy in this one.

oh, and at some point we went to twice told tales (one of TWO amazing used bookstores within like 5 feet of the goodzok household), and skratty found...

i find this way too amusing.

day two: wellesley, wellesley...

saturday's adventures included a trip to mercer island for a LOVELY picnic with wellesley women! and their adorable children. among skratty's extracurricular activities, she is the alumnae admissions representative for the wellesley club of washington. that's right. she's a rockstar. so less than 24 hours after moving to seattle, i'm already workin' those wellesley connections. and enjoying brown sugar shortbread puffs (aka AMAZINGNESS), scrumptious quinoa salad, and other lovely picnicy foodstuffs. there was some grilling of the wisdom of moving to a new city in today's rather lackluster economy, but most of the alums were quite supportive and offered lots of advice for the jobsearch. plus, we got to see some blue angels. and that was cool.

awww...


skratty found a playground!


it's harder when you're bigger than skratty-sized.

LATER THAT EVENING...







i love skratty's eyes.

day three: brunch! and fishes!

a weekend in seattle is not complete without some sort of exciting brunch! rather than another trip to veracruz at coastal kitchen (mmmm. goat cheese scrambles. mmmmm.), this weekend brunch was even BETTER! stu hosted a fantastic pot-luck brunch of fruit and muffins (skratty's lemon poppyseed and blueberry coffee cake. oh so good.) and pancakes and cinnamon buns and more fruit and eggs and magical single-serve coffee and it was just lovely. and even more lovely because skratty has such great friends. i'd met most everyone over the last couple trips out here, and had heard stories or seen facebook photos of just about everyone else - and it was so, so nice to be welcomed to seattle by new friends. plus, like skratty, they are hilarious and i enjoy them immensely.

since it was such a lovely day, after running some errands (costco! woot!), we went up to the locks near ballard to watch the salmon jumping up their little salmon jumping ladders.

sadly, we did not see many jumping - they're kind of big. and apparently lazy. just look at these fellas!

look! i found a fun lifty bridge!


and, as is traditional now, we found more funky statues

oooh, artsy.

what a fantastic welcome to seattle. huuuuuge thanks to skratty and keith (who shall be nicknamed soon. he doesn't like the one we came up with) for being so awesome and amazing and making me feel so loved and not crazy at all. love you both!

destination reached!

i made it to seattle!

*cheers*

i shall share more from the road into seattle and the arrival celebration with the goodzoks last night, but again know that maddie has safely brought me from one side of I-90 to the other, skratty and keith are taking amazing care of me, and i am wonderously happy to be home again. even if it included dealing with sea week friday traffic for hours and hours yesterday afternoon.

but i made it!

more later, i promise :)

spokane to seattle! miles 3330ish to 3610ish!

last day. i knew it wouldn't be a bad driving day - i'd taken the bus from spokane to seattle in december, and, well. if i could survive eastern washington in the middle of winter, eastern washington in the first day of august would be totally doable. plus, by this point, 280 miles is nuthin'. walk in the park. or, well, drive.

and it was like a park! so pretty!

it kind of looked like this. a lot.


then i found another scenic overlook! washington's another good state to trust for the overlooks.


the wildflowers are a bit, um, dry.




eventually, the mountains came into view...

now, the last time that i saw these mountains, it was the very end of december. there'd been no snow the whole way, and actually gorgeously sunny in wenatchee. then we hit the mountains, and we're soon at the side of the road watching the driver put chains on the greyhound bus. white out conditions. we couldn't take one of the passes because they were doing avalanche control. yeah.

this time, it was much prettier. maddie continued her rockstarness all the way up and through the mountains and down the other side! by this point, sara had called to tell me that the blue angles' practice had closed the I-90 bridge from 12:30-2:40, so i might have to take the other bridge into seattle. i figured i'd just pull off at one of the exits before the bridge, and then i'd just get back on I-90 after the bridge opened. good plan, right?

well. not quite, as i didn't actually know the last exit before the bridge (the other side of mercer island, it was kind of confusing), and, well. i ended up stopped on the bridge for about 20 minutes before they reopened it. thankfully, it was only about 20 minutes, and it was a lovely time to stop and do some crosswords.

seriously, i did crosswords. on the highway.

but then the bridge opened, and the day was glorious, and i was on my way into seattle! all the way to I-5. where it was friday afternoon traffic on sea week. hmmm.

there was some traffic. but it was stopped when i took the picture this time :)

skratty's exit was only a couple down the road, and by about 3:30 skratty and i were unloading maddie in our new home!

*phew* made it.

missoula to spokane. miles 3070 to 3330ish.

up again fairy early this morning, i decided to stop by the university again to wander around a bit -and make the obligatory stop at the university bookstore for postcards. (i actually hadn't found postcards anywhere else yesterday - i knew they'd have some there, among other things.)

oooh, i found a grizzly!

as i was leaving, i took another look at the map and noticed lolo hot springs about 30 miles outside of missoula - lolo pass is right on the border of idaho and montana, and was one of the passes taken by lewis and clark. i'd heard of the hot springs, though, and thought - it's been a long trip! i deserve to sit in hot springs for a bit, right? right.

well, in theory, that's a great idea. the hot springs themselves, though, not so impressive. or they're hiding the impressive part - the only hot springs i found was more like a cement community pool fed by natural springs rather than, well, whatever pools are normally filled with. (i don't like to think about that, generally.) in any case, i wasn't particularly keen on giving money to someone to let me sit in their concrete pool at the side of the road - where's my secluded natural spring surrounded by trees and rocks and pretty? ah well. it was a pretty drive.

a couple hours later, in coeur d'alene, i stop to sit in the sun for a bit on the beach... i wanted to go parasailing, but they were booked for the rest of the day. booo. another time.

instead, i tried a "moose dog". that's right. rochester gave me a carrot hot - grilled carrot in a hot dog bun - coeur d'alene gives me the moose dog, a hot dog with grilled peppers and onions and spicy mustard and relish and... cream cheese? i was intrigued. they couldn't be serious.

they were.

and it was actually pretty good. who would've guessed?

only another half hour or so to spokane, when it was time to settle for the night... as i was checking in, another hotel patron happened to see that i was from massachusetts, and we discovered that we're both moving to seattle from boston! yay for new friends and new cities and what a fabulous way to spend a last evening before arriving in a new city.

tomorrow, seattle. and a new home.

bozeman to missoula. miles 2867 to 3070ish.

despite the hours of driving, wandering around, biking, and blogging that fill my day, i still manage to wake up ridiculously early in the morning. part of this waking up early, i think, has to do with the uncertainty of my driving plan over the last couple days - i still had no definite plan, other than getting to missoula and making a stop at the big sky brewing company while in town. would i continue on up to kalispell and glacier national park? would i stay in missoula? would i go to kalispell for the night and stop in glacier in the morning? would i just sit in my car and pull my hat down and avoid making any decision at all? gah.

in any case, i was up fairly early so i figured i'd just get on the road again toward missoula. the first big stop after bozeman turned out to be butte - a town i'd seen on the map, and probably heard mentioned by my mother a couple times, but i had no real sense of what there was to see, of the history of the town. it was time to stop and fill up the water bottle and stretch my legs, anyway, so i figured i'd at least drive through town - directions to a historic downtown seemed promising, right? right. i also had some spotty cell phone coverage by this point, so i quickly checked in with my mother - the conversation went something like this:

me: so i made it out of bozeman alive. ps it was a lot prettier than i expected! anything interesting in butte?
linda: well... you could go see the berkeley mining pit. i think it's supposed to be one of the biggest copper mines in the country.
me: oh... is that what that big hole in the mountain is? huh. that makes sense.

that whole cliff face? yeah, that's the berkeley pit.

(oh, erica.)

so i ended up driving into town and getting a bit lost, and finding myself at the pit. for $2, you can go through the side of the mountain to a viewing platform in the pit. and learn something about the history of mining in southwestern montana. turns out, butte was a big mining town. who knew?

look! a waterfall!

well, perhaps the people who put all these big drilling and milling equipment all over the city.

erica, of course, finds the one that's been turned into the centerpiece of a garden :)

after leaving butte, i'm back on I-90 headed toward missoula. there are more mountains.

by the time i got to missoula, made my stop at the big sky brewing company - home of moose drool, which ashley's father introduced me to last christmas, and is a pretty fabulous beer - it was decision time: stay in missoula and hang out? or push ahead and go on a couple hours north to kalispell and glacier? after much wandering and contemplating, i decide to stay in missoula and relax rather than exhaust myself trying to get up to glacier only to turn around the next day. also, missoula's a fun town - and has a pretty extensive bike path system, and i was hankering for another bike ride.

i do so love riding along rivers.

missoula also happens to be home of the university of montana - in honor of the university, there is a giant 'M' on the side of the hill behind the university.

turns out there's a path that you can hike up to the M. supposedly great views of the valley and town and everything. i like outlooks. i like hiking. i'm totally up for it. right?

right. also turns out that this path is a bit under a mile and a half long, consists of 13 switchbacks, and climbs 620 vertical feet. yeah. you feel that one.

that's the path along the right there.

but the views are totally worth it.

oh, and while biking around looking for a grocery store for dinner... skratty dear, this is for you:

(i laughed. a lot.)