“I always enjoy going out west” – Lewis and Clarke (together simultaneously, right before they both pointed at each other and said “ahhhhhhh”)
Like Mr. Lewis and Sir Clarke, I also enjoy going out west. In fact, the place I enjoy going the most out west is Seattle.

Seattle is a great city filled with good food and surrounded by beautiful vistas. Which is like me, anytime I go out to dinner with Stacey.

This trip, was extra special because it came 8 and 1/2 years after Stacey and I visited the city, on our first vacation together as a couple.

• Oh, and our Friends Soren and Sarah Yoy WANNA be with  getting married…so there’s that.

You’ll remember that I said this was 8 years after our first trip, well here’s proof.

If you weren’t able to guess, the image on the right was 8 years ago, you can tell because I’m a baby and Stacey has way less gray hair. We’d walked around Pike’s Place looking for the spot we’d taken that first photo and Stacey was convinced it was somewhere completely different than where it was, and despite my protestations, she kept pushing me to another part of the market.

Here’s a picture of her when she realized I was right…

It. Was. Glorious.

But I digress, before we’d even gotten to that point of our trip, we’d made our way over to the Olympic Peninsula for Sarah and Soren’s wedding.

 

Due to poor planning, we needed to stay at an Air BnB near Port Angeles on the peninsula on Friday and It. Was. Amazing.

First, it was a working farm and the family who ran it lived entirely “off the grid” and the money from the AirBnB went back into helping run the farm.

Second, they had a turkey named Suzanne. Suzanne is 2 months old and wasn’t entirely sure on how to bird so they got her a companion hen named Carl to assist.

 

 

Third, our host gave us gluten free pancakes since we’d mentioned we were looking for good ones in the area…which Stacey accepted with gusto.

Despite the disposition, she did share…one.

We actually spent much of Friday evening and most of Saturday at Lake Crescent, which is where the wedding was going to take place.

The wedding was beautiful, my date was beautiful, and the land around us was beautiful.

I also got super drunk and we looked at the stars…it was perfect.

We spent Sunday, after a short recovery period, traveling back towards Seattle proper and had a quick stop with my family outside of Poulsbo.

They are good people (meaning they put up with me) and they took us to a great restaurant in Port Gamble called the Butcher and Baker Provisions.

It was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

We finally got back to Seattle proper Sunday evening and hit up the Kimpton Palladian Hotel where we stayed for our final night on the west coast.

I found my favorite picture of Dave Matthews…

And Stacey found her happy place…

The next morning we hit up Pike’s Place early, to avoid tourists and make sure we could eat at Piroshky Piroshky where I basically got the Russian version of the breakfast crunch wrap from Taco Bell.

And Stacey got blackberries because she’s perfect and beautiful.

It was, as they all are, a wonderful trip to Seattle and I cannot wait to go back and try more foods and explore more with my beautiful travel companion.

The Blob