Day 220 - Arriving in Seattle, WA

One thing we’ve come to realise on our travels is that getting up at 04:45 is horrible no matter where you are in the world. We grabbed our belongings and then caught a taxi to the train station. Here we went through security and then boarded the train we left on time at 06:40. The Amtrak journey went smoothly really and the customs check at the US border also went swiftly with seemingly no hassle for anyone.

About five hours later we arrived in Seattle and, felling very tired, we couldn’t bothered with the hassle of catching public transport to our motel and so hopped into a taxi and paid the fixed rate fee to be taken down to the airport location where the Motel 6 awaited us.

After checking in we crashed in our room for a while before eventually heading back out to get some lunch. 

This came in the form of a Denny’s which was just down the road (there’s very little choice in this area.) We were pretty stunned at just how busy this place was though very quickly noticed a similarity between all the other diners here – they were all geeks! Well geekish; the all were clearly here for some sort of convention and all wore or held some form of merchandise relating to the convention’s subject. The theme seemed to be a pony looking creature and so we joked about what it could possibly be, concluding that it would be great if they were all here for a My Little Pony convention. We couldn’t see this though as most of the people here we males in their twenties so we figured it was just some strange Japanese Anime craze. The waitress brought us our food and so we asked her to spill the beans on what on earth was happening. She seemed only too eager to talk and plonked herself down next to Corrie where she tried to explain. She likened what was going on to being much like people who take pleasure in watching animal pornography to which here and Corrie snorted out in laughter, immediately drawing everyone’s attention to us three in the centre of the diner. She then whispered to us that it was in fact a gathering for fans of… My Little Pony and that it was a big deal here! We thought we’d go and check out this convention later but for now just went back to the motel.

We didn’t really do much for the rest of the day but Danny did research the convention and found that it was a private event and tickets were all sold out!

We later found a nearby Subway for tea and then had a nice evening in front of the TV. During this TV time we caught on the news that a hemp festival was in town and seemed to be a big event. It seems we have picked one of the weirdest weekends to be in Seattle!