Orienting Myself in a Quick-Quick-Slow Pace: March 2013

Before the trip

My roommate longed for this trip because the GroundSpeak Headquarter, which is the association who manages geocaching, is in Seattle. My roommate is a die-hard geocacher, and he will leave the US soon, so he has a good reason to visit Seattle. I have been to Seattle several times, and I recently would like to save money. However, I found out that I could use my credit card points to exchange an air ticket. Moreover, we had inexpensive lodging in a hostel, so I followed my roommate to go to Seattle.

It turns out that the trip was still very interesting. I still found new things to do. We especially had a lot of walking. I think the sum of walking distance in all 4 days is longer than a full marathon.

Below is a figure of the walking routes for each day. Each day is in different color. The smiley faces are the geocaches that we have found.

Day 1 -- Space Needle, Queen Anne (South)

Besides my roommate thelaptop, he also asked his friend, roticv, to join. His friend works in Facebook in bay area. He came to Seattle mainly because of work, but he was with us a few days for geocaching.

At the airport, I saw the first thing that was new since the last time in Seattle 4 years ago. There is a new light rail system connecting the airport to the downtown. It took 30 min to get to the downtown by the light rail.

Our hostel is about 15 minute walk NW of the light rail station. After leaving our items in the hostel, we started our geocaching trip in the Seattle Center, where the Space Needle is at. thelaptop and roticv have not been to Seattle, so they had some pictures with the Space Needle.

We met other geocachers along the way when we found out some people appeared to be searching for something, only to find a non-geocacher (aka muggle) blocked the cache location. This location is close to a huge water fountain in front of the Space Needle, so it is a good place for pictures. We also found a huge lamppost cache that had a lamppost skirt in a non-traditional way.

Then, we walked uphill in the Queen Anne area. Our goal was just to find geocaches before sundown, but we walked to an area that has a great scenery of Seattle downtown. There also seemed to be many tourists using their cameras.

I was a vegetarian during this Seattle trip. We went to a Chinese vegetarian restaurant for dinner. After the dinner and walking back to the hostel, we passed through the huge water fountain again in the evening. The fountain had a different kind of beauty.