Seattle Oysters and Brews

Seattle generally feels like a safer place than St. Louis, but there did seem to be a larger hobo situation here than back home. 

We had some delicious oysters at the Walrus and the Carpenter. I remember our servers asking which of the EIGHT types fresh oysters I wanted and... I think I was briefly surprised that there was more than one type. I've only had them on a handful of occasions. Anyway I ordered a nice mixture of blue pool, judd cove, and chelsea gem and then ate them having absolutely no idea which was which.

I was impressed by the place's cool decor.

We proceeded to drink beers all over the damn place on a microbrewery crawl.

Lydia was excited that Fair Isle had a fancy beer named after her.

"Lydia is a fall inspired farmhouse ale aged in oak puncheons. Brewed with triticale grown by MJW Grain Inc. in Ritzville, WA, barley grown by Palouse Heritage in Endicott, WA and malted by LINC Malts. Created with ingredients farmed and foraged in the Pacific Northwest. Fermented with our house blend of wild and feral yeasts and bacterias."

I was amused to see that former Seattle Supersonic Shawn Kemp had his name on a weed shop.

There were food trucks all over the place near the breweries and burritos happened.

Tip us and then bus your own table because we're too busy collecting tips.

I guess we wanted the exercise but around this point we went on a very long walk to the last brewery.

Dirty Couch Brewing is the most depressing name for a place that makes beer but that's their right. The beer was decent.

I liked that the empty flight board could give a good paddlin in a pinch.

We ended our day's consumption with some ice cream from Molly Moon's. The building's set up was so weird, it was like a tiny little ice cream closet smushed inside of a laundromat.

All Over the Peninsula

My Grandpa Milito was in the army during the Korean War, and was stationed in Japan. He told me about how bad/nonexistent the sewage system was and talked about trucks that would drive around and collect poop... sort of like garbage trucks, and I think it was the trucks that he called "honey buckets". I always thought that was a hideous name. Well it turns out a main crap shed provider in the area is called Honey Bucket and so now I see them all of the time. I'm not sure how my grandpa would feel about all of the portable toilets in Washington state reminding me of him but a legacy is a legacy.

"Tokyo - It's a nice place but I like home much better" - Grandpa Milito

We decided it would be cool and meta if the car we were riding in was riding a boat.

Hate to see Seattle leave but love to watch it go.

Bainbridge Island lies a hop across Puget Sound.

Teriyaki is a huge thing in Seattle. There are places selling it all over the place. I would hazard a guess that there are more teriyaki places here than the classic Chinese-American food that you find in the midwest.

Luckily it's really damn good. A real honey bucket of flavor.

Olympic National Park is interesting because it isn't contiguous. There's the main blob but then there's a strip that runs along the coast as well.

It was mating season for some giant dinosaur sized queen ants. You could tell because they were all over the place looking for suitable places to build a nest.

Many of them were not successful.

We had a snack attack and sampled some of the local delicacies.

After exploring the big blob we headed out to the beach portion of the park. It was interesting how much driftwood there was everywhere.

There was a bleached dead tree elephant graveyard type thing going on here.

Some of the wood drifted right into my hand.

My understanding is that the rainforests in this park receive the most rainfall in the continental United States. I don't know that I've ever been to a place quite like this. It's cool because the moisture allows the place to be bursting with life, but it's also cold so the kinds of plants are different from what you might expect in a rainforest. Pine trees next to ferns type of thing.

There was a lot of fun nurse treeing going on, where a tree dies and falls over and then a bunch of other trees grow out of it.

I believe this is a banana slug.

On our way back through the olympic peninsula we swung through Olympia and took a picture of the capitol building there because I have some sort of undiagnosed sickness.