Henrik in Seattle

Adventures in Tacoma

March 6th, 2006

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This Sunday afternoon, I thought that the rest of the evening would just be a normal, slightly boring evening. Perhaps I would watch a movie, but not more exciting than that. Well, I was wrong.

At 4pm, Markus came into my room and asked if I wanted to join him to a [Korn->http://www.korn.com/] concert three hours later, since he couldn't get in contact with the person who was supposed to go with him. I said, "sure", and two hours later, we sat on a bus down to Tacoma, where the concert was.

Markus had prepared a small note with bus numbers and times so we knew where we were supposed to change busses to make sure that everything would run smoothly. However, what Markus hadn't thought about (and me neither to be honest), was whether there was a bus for us to get back to Seattle after the concert. It turned out, there was none.

The next bus leaving Tacoma heading even roughly in our direction was at 3.06 am, and that bus only took us to Sea-Tac international airport. But we figured that from the airport there would surely be going buses back to Seattle downtown even very early in the morning, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Now, I'm getting ahead of myself. The clock is about 11.15 pm, and it's still a long time until 3.06 am. Since there was not much fun to do outside the arena, we thought we might as well just walk all the way to downtown Tacoma. And so we did. We thought that surely there must be some place which was open 24h a day, some fast food restaurant or similar. So we spent half an hour or so walking around downtown looking for some place which was open. We never found one. However, we did find something else; a park. It wasn't really a special park, just a small park with a view of the port of Tacoma (not very exciting, mostly warehouses and cranes). After watching the port of Tacoma by night for a while, we were about to leave the park when we saw a totem pole. And not just any totem pole, according to the inscription, the 103 years old totem pole was actually the world's tallest [totem pole->http://www.metroparkstacoma.org/page.php?id=168]! (I've come to doubt that after some [research->http://users.imag.net/~sry.jkramer/nativetotems/records.htm] on the Internet, however.)

Strengthened by this totem pole sighting, we continued our so far fruitless search for an open restaurant. Or just any place where we could go in and keep ourselves warm, really. We walked a few more streets, and finally found [Hotel Sheraton->http://www.sheratontacoma.com/]. Quickly, we walked in through the doors, and asked the girl behind the desk if we could just sit down for an hour or two in their lobby. She seemed a little bit uncertain, so she called for a guard to come to speak with us. He talked to us for about 10 seconds (he probably just wanted to make sure we were not homeless people) and then we could sit down in their comfortable chairs for an hour or two. They even had a TV for us to kill some time with, although there is really nothing good on TV in the middle of a Sunday night.

At about 2.30 am we began walking back to the bus stop where we were supposed to catch our bus to the airport. We got onto it, and forty minutes later we were there. Now, as I said earlier, one could assume that there would be buses to Seattle leaving the airport even early in the morning. Well, one could assume that, but then one would be wrong. We had to wait slightly more than one hour for the first bus for the day to arrive. While we were waiting, we bought a some food in a cafe at the airport which just had opened.

Finally, the bus arrived and took us to downtown. There, we transferred to a bus which took us home to the University District. We stepped through the door to our house, just seven hours after the concert was over. That's how well the bus system works here in America, and then, we're pretty well off here in the north west.

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Entry Filed under: Traveling, Seattle