...and of course you were right

How could I possibly be succinct when there is so much to write about! The wonderful wedding, Steve's receding hairline, watching Brandon's hair get higher and higher, the days at uni taking bets on 90210 plot lines, the abuse for forgetting to set the video, the relief that Sanjay had taped it after all (purely for research on the plot lines of course), the 90210 updates at coffee breaks, evenings curled up on the lounge with my wonderful wife watching those frolicsome kids, thinking Auuuuundrea was so much better than Kelly and what's her face who was Brandon's sister, ahhh, the memories ... man I had a sad life!

And speaking of wonderful weddings and sad lives in the past tense, brings me to the reason for the holiday being in the Seattle region, Felicity's appearance as matron of honour in her friend Alisa and now husband Darren's wedding. Instead of getting all gushy and sprouting things like how in my totally objective and unbiased opinion, Felicity was by far the most beautiful woman at the wedding with the natural exclusion of the bride, as brides tend to be in a class of their own on their wedding days, I will instead go against strict orders to the contrary and disappoint a friend by informing them that Frasier's radio station does not exist, and hence while my search of the radio waves uncovered many other stations with names like KZRL, my search for his, hampered only slightly by the fact that I don't know the name of his station, was somewhat fruitless, as would have been my search for his little coffee shop, for similar reasons, had I chosen to embark it. The day of the wedding was bright and clear, and I was sufficiently (barely) un-jetlagged to avoid backing the car over the bride and most-beautiful-woman-at-the-wedding-with-the-natural-exclusion-of-the-bride after bringing them back from having their photos taken round by the Olympia (the capital of Washington) Capitol Building modelled on the Capitol Building in Washington.

Sunday, the day after the wedding, was spent watching the Mariners whip the Angels and pretending I knew how to score and finding that pretending to know how to score actually makes baseball much more interesting and sitting in the sun and getting burnt along with Alisa and Darren and their family and friends, and commenting on just how good Mt Rainier looked, and deciding that as Alisa and Darren were heading off on their honeymoon, we'd go visit Mt Rainier then next day, which was a good plan, until the next day was typical north west weather, and as the day was rainier, we thought that the Mt could take care of itself, and so we headed for Portland in Oregon where there's no sales tax to go shopping which was also a good plan, only it would have been useful to know where the shops are located in Portland, so we drove around having one of those slight tiffs that married couples tend to when they are lost and suddenly found ourselves in Washington Park where they test roses and have Japanese gardens and people who ask you the say to the Japanese gardens and then we decided that seeing as how we were lost we might as well follow the scenic drive signs which we lost somewhere in the middle of some scenic scenery which was fine because after a short detour up a dead-end street to do a U-turn in someone's drive except that there was a car following us, and as the street was the sort that only people who live there (and people who are lost would go up), the chances that the drive we pulled into to turn around would be the one which belonged to the car following us were too high to pull into any of the driveways until fortunately the car pulled into a driveway just before we ran out of driveways to pull into and we found that in our being lost we'd got onto the road that we wanted to get onto to head for the one shopping mall that we seemed to have located on the map, which co-incidentally named Washington Square, which gave the day a nice symmetry as having left Washington for Oregon we spent most of our time in Oregon in Washington's of one description or another. Needless to say we did some shopping, and then discovered that it is not only garlic bagels that I'm allergic to (which I'd determined in New York), but also plain bagels, at least the ones with the little yellowish lumpy coating, and so the search began for antihistamine tablets, which was successful, and so lead onto a search for a motel for the night, which was also ultimately successful (although the motel we found wasn't the one we were looking for) which lead onto another search for a restaurant to eat at which ended up being successful by a process of overload (we've passed so many restaurants and haven't been able to make up our mind we'll stop at the next one). We were supposed to meet Darren and Alisa at Cannon Beach in Oregon on Tuesday at noon, but noon found us in more shops, which made it very fortunate that we had phoned them and changed the time to meet to 1:30 and just made it to the meeting point outside the public loos, which are just next to the travel information centre (we found the travel information centre the last time we were in Cannon Beach just after we found out the public loos were locked - and in fact the meeting point was the travel information centre, but the car park is right next to the loos, so the travel information centre was really a euphemism for the public loos), at 1:30. Spent some time dodging raindrops in between shops around Cannon Beach, ate some food, stayed the night, ate some more food, had some good long chats with the honeymooners, and decided that despite the weather being pretty bleak (although not as bad as the last time we were there when there was a massive storm with 100mph winds and so on) this time we were going to go for a walk on the beach. Technically we achieved this. We got about 10 metres onto the beach, got a sufficient amount of wind and rain into our hoods and jackets, took a photo to prove we did it, and then headed back to the car, and on down the coast to Newport.

Newport is where we did almost nothing for 3 days, although I suspect that paying too much to see too few sealions in America's largest sea cave, going and watching really cool jellyfish swim around the aquarium which once housed the now free Willy, and watching far more sealions for free on some of the wharves down at Old Newport Harbour probably counts as doing something. The reason we did nothing was because at the recommendation of Alisa's sister we found ourselves at the Sylvia Beach Hotel, a hotel in which every room has been decorated in the theme of a different author. It's a pretty old hotel, and is right on the beach, although named after Sylvia Beach who I think sold books in San Francisco at some stage, and has a big library where you can sit and read and play games and listen to the surf and watch the waves and which is totally devoid of phones and TVs and GSM coverage, and where the rooms contain journals in which the occupants of the rooms record their stays in varying degrees of detail and provide handy hints about putting pillows between the bed-head and the wall of the F. Scott Fitzgerald room. It really is an ideal place to do very little. We started off in Jane Austen, which had pictures up of Jane Austen's place just down the road from us in Hampshire which seemed a bit strange, then moved on to F. Scott Fitzgerald (hence the knowledge of the handy hints in the journal), and finally ended up in the larger Colette, complete with fire, red divan by the window over looking the sea, and veranda over the beach. You could eat dinner there, which we did the first night - fixed menu with a choice of main, seated at a table with other guests. Superb meal, and enjoyable meeting other people and being asked if all the craze with espresso had spread from Seattle across to Europe (a challenge to know how to answer that one as it was fairly early on in the meal and we had a few more courses to sit with these people.) Breakfast was included, and was similarly superb and communal. On one morning we found ourselves sitting at the same table as owner of the hotel, Goody Cable, who also owns a coffee shop in Portland called Rimski Korsokoffee, and who is full of all sorts of trivia about Rimski and various authors, and if anyone happens to know if the number of varieties of eucalyptus trees is really 479 I'd be grateful (I've already checked and the number of kilometres of straight railway track across the Nullarbor Plain is 478km, not the 408 that I'd originally sort of guessed at).

And then alas we drove back, were refused entry to an Irish pub (which served True Pints of Guinness, although I reckon if you tried to claim that 16oz was a "true pint" in Ireland I imagine you'd end up somewhat the worse for it) because Felicity didn't have her driver's license with her and couldn't prove she was over 21, so instead we went to Red Robin, a little restaurant type place, and to avoid the wait for tables caused by the large number of teenagers in evening wear eating out before heading to the prom we decided to sit in the bar area, which was fine until we were all asked for ID again, and got chucked out of the bar because Felicity was underage, so we had to join the queue for tables, and eventually were seated where upon we ordered drinks and no-one asked us of any ID. The ironic thing was that Felicity wasn't drinking at all anyway. It did seem a touch obsessive.

The next day we drove back up to Seattle Airport, dropped off the rental, found our respective checkin queues (mine was at the opposite end of the airport from Felicity's, but I still managed to walk there, check in and walk back in time to spend a good half-hour in Felicity's check-in line), see Felicity off, and go and sit in the United lounge (frequent flier points are good for something) for about 6 hours until my plane left at 11:30pm. This late flight, combined with the timezone difference meant that my 3 hour and ten minute flight to Chicago got me in at 5am, ensuring that I didn't get any sleep. Fortunately my mood was drastically improved by American Airlines concern for my safety as they X-rayed my luggage just in case I'd accidentally packed a bomb, and a couple of minutes of dozing was sufficient to ensure that the only thing I forgot on my Canadian customs form was my first name.

So since getting to Montreal I've spent time catching up on sleep, in meetings, and avoiding walking after walking back to the hotel from a restaurant in new shoes. Hopefully I'll manage to see a little of the city at some stage.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Felicity attempts to cope with jet-lag and study for a CPA exam, and at last check had not attempted to contact the elusive Reg.

Cheers,

Jonathan.

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