A country bumpkin's trip to Seattle (Part 1)
[This is an edited re-post from a prior Substack post on August 15, 2025.]
Well, I survived my first trip to Seattle in… 7…8… years? I don’t recall for sure. <Whispered mumbles> “It wasn’t THAT bad…"
“Fifteen bucks?” I exclaimed when we paid to park our car in a garage near the Bremerton-to-Seattle ferry station. Humph…. Famous last words.
Our 32nd anniversary coincided with a Seattle Mariners daytime game on Thursday last week. Baseball has been the Americana that has helped me try to get out of the anti-social funk I’ve been in for… Well, since before COVID, at least. Other than a minor league game once every few years, we hadn’t been to a MLB game since about 2011 or 2012. I’ll talk more about why the slow sport is so great in part 2. First: the journey over there.
The ferry just makes sense for us, especially in a state that taxes gasoline like the 70s-80s cast of Saturday Night Live used to attack piles of coke on mirror-topped coffee tables. Driving around is just silly. Add to that a toll on a bridge that was promised to disappear when said bridge was paid off (it didn’t); and the cost to park in Seattle… Which, by the way, isn’t just a monetary cost, but an emotional one. Driving in that city will make you want to punch kittens in the face after ten minutes. Probably.
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Anyhow, the walk-on passengers headed to Seattle ride free. It’s the trip home when people have shopped all day or drank all night where they get ya. The ferry was smooth despite the gray, cool weather, and it was littered with a few hundred other baseball fans. In the years since my last trip, the state had done something right by building a foot bridge over the large acreage over where cars waiting for the next ferry park. This was always a huge nightmare in the past, as folks leaving the ferry on foot to head south toward the ballfields had to get run over by narrowly dodge cars trying to catch the ferry before it leaves.
Once to the walking path along the waterfront, another improvement was obvious. “It looks weird without the Alaska Way Viaduct,” I told Dorothy. There used to be this gray, ugly elevated highway that ran along Seattle’s watery edge. Of course, It needed giant columns every couple-of-hundred feet or so, which created this weird no-man’s land of barely usable space. And by barely usable, I mean completely usable by drug addicts, drug dealers, drug PR firms, and even drub lobbyists. Oh, and “tent-conducted-adult-entertainment-and-other-horizontal-enterprises” merchants, if you get my meaning <Wink-Wink> 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉
But the road had been rebuilt over the tunnel which replaced the Viaduct. (If you’ve read my very first novel Tahoma’s Hammer, you know why you should never go into that watery grave.) So the street was now clear of “none-taxable-vendors” and they’d also added two special paths. One, a nice wide sidewalk for pedestrians. The other, a two-lane road maybe eight or ten feet wide for bikes, scooters, and the such. And it was littered with Lime bikes all along the way.
“What, pray tell, is a Lime bike?” you may’ve just asked.
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I think the first thing I’d like to point out from this photo I clipped from a GeekWire article is the guy NOT riding a Lime bike next to about 20 of them.For no reason. Totally no reason to point that out…… 😈
I know what you’re thinking if you’re anything like me: “Lime is a critical ingredient for a Mojito.” And you’d be correct. But that isn’t ALL it is. Apparently it is also the name of an app you use to rent electric bikes in Seattle. Which all sport various shades of the same green several of the Seattle sports-ball teams use. Which make sense. We should use the color and name of a fruit that grows in the Florida Keys for Seattle sports-ball teams… And e-bike rental apps.
Regardless of my 2 cents (which thanks to inflation from 2021 thru 2024, spends like 1 cent), apparently the bikes do get rented—and left at random places. Like—hundreds of feet from the next crosswalk. Next to a tree and no stores. Three of them that I counted before we crossed the road to head to T-Mobile Park. I’m sure it has nothing to do with running out of battery power or rental time or whatever…
When we finally passed the football stadium, we were on final approach to the baseball field, running early to the game thanks to catching the early ferry. The various food and junk vendors had set up… as had the Jesus Barkers. (You know them. They have big signs and loud megaphones.) Now, I have no problem with their message. Heck, I happen to believe and agree with them. And as a “freedom-of-speech” proponent, I would’ve been okay with all the other major religion barkers, too. But sorry dude: God may’ve called you to spread the word, but not at 130 decibels. Seriously. “Don’t cause hearing damage to send a message of peace and love” is probably in the Jesus Barker 101 manual. Or it should be. Between getting to the alley and getting in the gate we passed three of them.
Of course, part of what we passed on the walk was parking near the stadium. “60 bucks?” I screamed.
Three minutes later… “A hundred bucks??? Where’s my nitroglycerin?” Who can afford to pay 100 American quid to park near a sports-ball stadium? I’ll tell you who next week as I finish this action-packed saga of ballpark food and fans who don’t care enough about their tickets to read what seats they should be in.
Holy moly (NOT Jesus barking at you), I didn’t know this blog would get so long. I suppose this is a great stopping point. I’ll pick this up in the next newsletter! Thanks for reading along. Also: drop a comment and let me know what your think (good or bad) of how I’ve been running these newsletters lately!