Exit, Talking About the Weather

The meteorological shortcomings of the Pacific Northwest are very real, and much of our trip featured grey, gloomy weather like this (although with temperatures that never broke 75 the whole week, it was a nice relief from the East Coast heatwave):


But the last day of our trip yielded two astonishingly beautiful moments. First, a rainbow arched over Seattle as we approached on the Bainbridge Island ferry:


And then, a few hours later, came a glorious sunset over the Olympic Mountains:


And suddenly the whole trip was worth it.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Nights of the Weird

There is no better way to begin my review of Seattle gay nightlife than at the beginning, when we walked into our first bar of the weekend to be greeted by a flash-mob brass band.

That set the tone for what has to be the quirkiest big city I've ever visited.

We all know Seattle as the place of coffee, salmon, Microsoft and grunge. But as a major American city with a well-known gayborhood (Capitol Hill, just northeast of downtown), I figured its nightlife would be pretty standard.

Not a chance.

From two different sources we heard that there were three places worth visiting: The Lobby and Purr, for drinks, and The Cuff, for dancing.

We walked into The Lobby at about 10:30 on a Friday night. The place was packed, with a mix of gay men, lesbians and straight people, most of whom seemed to have been there since the happy hour ended at 7 p.m. It's a storefront bar, the main level decorated in vaguely 19th-century style, with a mezzanine balcony on three sides that is equally vaguely South Beach-modern. We got our beers -- one nice thing about Seattle is that every bar has a good selection of local craft brews, usually priced in increments of a quarter -- and had barely settled in to take in the scene when a group of people descended from the balcony, pulled trumpets and trombones out of their clothing and proceeded to cavort wildly around, through the crowd and on the bar, for a good ten minutes.

What that was about, I have no idea, but it seemed that much of the crowd expected it -- when the band left, so did they, and the place emptied out. Ears ringing, we decided to try our luck at Purr, just around the corner.

And were greeted by more local character, in the form of the Seattle chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence ...

... a person carrying his, um, companion around with him ...

... and also an amusing sign above one of the bars ...

But at Purr we also had one of the best evenings we've ever had in a bar, falling easily into conversation with many different people: Seattleites are friendly and nice, and it seemed they just wanted to be friendly, without having an ulterior motive.

This was a youngish crowd, almost all white, and generally quite attractive. Capitol Hill seems also to be a center of straight nightlife, and in the streets around Purr, spilling out of the straight bars, were many examples of the stereotypical Seattle look (flannel shirts, shaggy hair, poor shaving habits), but the gay people looked much more conventional, at least when they weren't in drag or carrying dolls around.

We could have stayed all night, but your intrepid reporter wanted to check out The Cuff as well. Big mistake -- the place was empty on a Friday night. But with a local friend in the lead, we gave it another chance the next night.

Yet more weirdness ensued. The Cuff clearly wants, at some level, to be a leather bar, but it isn't happening. The club has essentially two rooms, a big barroom where you enter that contains people who look like they belong in a leather bar, but aren't wearing leather; and beyond that, a half-set of stairs down, a dance floor filled with people who wouldn't look out of place at New York's Club 57, or the Sip 'n Twirl on Fire Island. We naturally gravitated to the latter, despite what I'd delicately describe as music for people with a short attention span, and were having fun dancing with old acquaintances from New York and our new friends from Purr when, at 1:20a, they announced last call at the bar.

And then, at 1:35, announced that the bar had closed and that you had 15 minutes to finish your drinks.

And then, at 1:50, sent a burly barback through the dance floor, taking drinks right out of people's hands.

Our visit to Seattle had concluded as weirdly as it had begun.

A Temple to Books, and Not the E- Kind

Seattle is an odd mixture of progressive and not. In the "not" column definitely falls the transportation system, which is seriously inadequate to a city of its stature -- not only is the city automobile-bound (a rail transit system is just now being constructed), but the highways aren't engineered to the standards common in a true car city like Los Angeles. Blocked roads, unexpected one-way streets, can't-turns and must-turns are common, and not always reflected clearly in the iPhone's Maps app, to our chagrin.

On the other hand, there is something awesome about a city that just built this as its new public library:


It's even more impressive to find the printed book being cared for so lavishly in the home of Microsoft and Amazon.com.

Washington's Wine Suburb

Washington State is now the second-largest producer of wine in the United States, behind only California. And judging from the extensive sampling we did, most is of extremely high quality, even at the lower price points where California wine is sweet and jammy.

There are two drawbacks, if you can call them that, to Washington wines. First, the state is best at full-bodied reds like Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet, even though those don't go with the state's best-known foods like salmon. (You will often find Oregon pinot noir under the "local" section of Seattle wine lists, probably for that reason. British Columbia, meanwhile, makes a small amount of excellent white wine, which is widely available in Vancouver restaurants, though little if any is exported.)

Second, the wine is grown in the eastern part of the state, a high, dry area that gets very warm during the day and cools off significantly at night -- just what the doctor ordered for wine grapes.

Unfortunately, this wine country is three to four hours away from Seattle, across a high mountain pass and quite a bit of desert. Not ideal for tourism, in other words, even if you've always wanted to visit a place called Walla Walla.

So the ever-practical locals have created a wine trail in the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, about 30 minutes' drive from downtown.

The tasting rooms, in industrial parks and strip malls, are perhaps the least bucolic I've ever seen:






But it makes for a pleasant excursion from the city, at least if you're not the designated driver.

And to that point, there is a rusty train track running right down the middle of the valley where the tasting rooms are; someone really should turn it into a wine train ...

Summer (?) in the City

Seattle is a place that favors outdoor culture -- sports, hiking, camping and so forth. And it's a place where people seem to be in generally good physical shape, and some of them like to show it off:





What amazed me about this particular part of the local culture was that the outdoor temperature on the days I took these pictures was barely 65 degrees. And it wasn't sunny.

But in a climate like that, I guess you take what you can get.

No, It's Not Any Better in Seattle

Apologies for the lapse in blogging; I had to run off for the weekend ... anyway, when we got to Seattle of course one of the first things we had to do was visit the Very First Starbucks, across from Pike Street Market:


I am sorry to report that the coffee there tastes just like the coffee at every other Starbucks I have ever been to. The best coffee in Seattle is found, not surprisingly, at local one-off shops or two- to three-store chains, where you will also find artistry like this:


Coffee at these independents is as good as I've had anywhere in the world.

Good Night, and Good Eating

Edison, Wash., between Bellingham (the main town for the San Juans region) and Seattle, was at one time best known for being the home town of Edward R. Murrow, who is still remembered there:


It's a two-stop-sign town that, according to Murrow's biographer, Joseph Persico, was in Murrow's day little more than a logging camp. It doesn't look like much more today:


But it has now, strangely, become a foodie mecca even though it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, with a renowned bakery, a deli serving local cheeses and fine wines, and more:


A few miles north are the oyster beds of Samish Bay, along the famous Chuckanut Drive, the local equivalent of Big Sur:



Taylor's, a local shellfish farm, even offers for sale the local Olympia oyster, tiny but strongly flavored. Olympias nearly vanished decades ago due to pollution and overfishing, but dedicated locals are trying to bring them back.


Persico describes Edison as being, in the 1920s, the last frontier, close to the end of the earth, but even then not unsophisticated -- the high school that Murrow attended had a debate club and an orchestra, and the senior-year dramatic production that Murrow starred in was the operetta "The Belles of Beaujolais," not a choice many schools would make today.

But I suspect Murrow, as worldly as he became, would be surprised by what has become of his hometown today.