Seattle: Food, Travel Karma and Parental Guilt

The Hunger
The noticeable silence here has been due to a week-long work trip up to the great city of Seattle. Not that I saw much of it since most of the time was spent in meeting rooms, both large and small. The highlight was a series of dinners with colleagues at the end of long days of work—almost all which featured seafood. Highlights included the:

• red curry thai noodles and sushi at Dragonfish;
• tuna tatiki and the spicy poke salad at Red Fin;
• crab cakes and kasu marinated black cod at Steelhead Diner (best restaurant of the week); and,
• the curried mussels and olive-crusted halibut at BlueAcre.

May we all be so lucky to live in a place where that kind of seafood is found on every corner!

Travel Karma or You Can Never Get Ahead
So my travel to Seattle started at 4:00 am Tuesday morning and looked like a long day which involved a connection through Atlanta (don’t ask). However, upon arriving at the airport gate I found myself being paged and told the direct flight had seats and was leaving now if I wanted to hop on. Uh, yeah. But what about my luggage—on its way to Seattle? Well, we will see once we get there. Alas, first bag off the plane. But now I am in Seattle at 9:30 a.m.—surely I won’t be able to get into my hotel room. Wrong again—straight in I go. Wow, that was some stroke of travel luck.

But of course we all know one fundamental rule—air travel basically bites and you know that for every good turn, two bad ones are on there way. Fortunately, I only had to wait for my return trip. We get to the airport, board the plane, pull away from the gate, stop, only to hear the captain announce that he heard a “funny noise.” Back to the gate—an hour of waiting to discover all was okay and away we go again. Unlike, the earlier experience with baggage, my bag was not first—not that it would have mattered since we had to wait 45 minutes for our bags to be unloaded.

When all was said and done, we got home three hours later than scheduled—exactly the amount of time that I saved on the way out. Hmmm.

That’s OK, It’s Just a Once in a Lifetime Event
Now leaving home always carries a load of sadness and guilt with it, but this one had a extra kick. You see, Emmett starts Kindergarten this Fall and as a result, he gets to go to the summer session which just happened to start the day I left for Seattle. Now technically, his first day at the new school is in August, but still it was a drag to miss his first actual day. Better mark my calendar now for the Fall because who would want to miss this?!