West Coast Part IV -- Birthday Time

Sorry, it's taking me awhile to get through these pictures from the West Coast, but we're almost there.  We got back into Seattle on my birthday (remember this is back in October...), and from now on, most of the pictures will involve eating.

The first place we went to after getting back was this kinda fancy looking Thai place by the airport.  I initially thought it would be kinda dumb and overpriced, but it turns out that this restaurant had the best tom yum soup we've ever tasted.  Mango Thai - remember if you're in Seattle.

There it is.  We got it with shrimp.  I think one reason I liked it was that they somehow kept the soup really "clean", as in no little random chunks of weirdness floating around.

We returned the car in the morning and then went to the waterfront to grab some grub.  Ivar's is a great place to grab a quick fish 'n chips.

Here's Ritika about to chow on some chowder.

You can feed the seagulls outside your leftovers.  This one became good friends with Ritz.

Another awkward shot with a seagull.

That stone french fry looked so much better than the starbucks at the time.

"We have ice cream"...and a freakishly huge mammal.

We've been watching Grey's Anatomy on TV, and it seems like most of the characters like riding the ferry boats in Seattle, so we got ourselves a ride.

There's the space needle.

Space needle and the couple.

Space needle sans couple.

Couple sans space needle.

We went to Bainbridge Island, which was really different than downtown.  Did some wine tasting.

I'm acting like I understood all the things the waitress told me about this one particular glass of wine.

Then we found ANOTHER Thai place, so of course we had to try the tom yum soup.  Not as great as Mango Thai, but it had a unique flavor.  I'm talking to Fik about the Chicago Marathon, which I was supposed to be training for at the time...

Back to downtown...

...where Ritika treated me to a four-star hotel for my birthday!  Kimpton hotels are bomb.  YOU GET YOUR OWN GOLDFISH!!!

So many balloons :)

And wine hour.  Man, I love pretending to be rich.

The grand finale: Ritika also got me dinner at the space needle.  Rotating restaurant?  Yes please.

See how happy I am?  The shirt is from Ritika's parents when they came into town.  Fits great.  Thanks uncle, auntie.

I got to eat this...

...while looking at this (See the shooting star?).

Ritz, you're awesome!

After dinner, sleep ensued, then a gigantic breakfast courtesy of AAA in the morning.  Love that card.  Every guy with a car as old as mine should get an AAA membership.  It's saved my butt so many times.  And this time, it got me a ginormous breakfast burrito.

One more post, and we'll be done!  Going to Rochester tomorrow for Thanksgiving!

West Coast Part III -- Back to Seattle

So we pick up after saying goodbye to Knuckles in San Jose, and we're gonna try to get back to Seattle in two days to make it in time for our conference, which is actually the real reason we were out on the West Coast to begin with.  My lovely companion insisted that we dish out the extra dough for an extra driver...

...which means that it was my turn to ride shotgun and annoy the driver.

At first, it was subtle.

Then my level of annoyingness rapidly increased.

But we were both in a goofy mood.

Here we are passing through San Fran again.

And then we took USA 101 across the Golden Gate Bridge.  This was one of the things I was most looking forward to, and the previous day it was super clear, but the day we actually drive over the thing, it's foggy as heck.

"Oh well" says Ritika.

This is me trying to look majestic in front of the majestic bridge.  Utter failure...on both our parts.

The most interesting thing to photograph was the construction.

We left graffiti of a cliche nature.

Goodbye beautiful bay.  We shall miss you.

Alright, it seems that I took over driving at this point, but that's ok.  We got a new car the night before leaving and we had a choice of either getting cruise control or an auxiliary audio port so we could listen to our ipod.  We decided to go for the aux port because I was getting really sick of Enrico, Brittany, and LMFAO, etc., etc.  But then it turned out that there ACTUALLY WAS CRUISE CONTROL.  I was so frustrated, because I didn't notice it until about 5 hours into the trip since the rental guy said the car didn't have it.  Stupid.  Just plain stupid.

And then we hit the redwood forests, where the roads were so twisty and windy that it didn't make sense to use the cruise control.  Rrrgg.

The redwoods were awesome though.  Can't believe that these have been alive for hundreds of years...before cars had cruise control.  Even before cars existed at all.

For being an old guy, this tree actually smelled pretty good.  I'm officially a tree-hugger now.  And yeah, I didn't realize Ritika took this picture until much much later.

We hit a stretch of the coast around dusk, which made for some pretty cool colors and low lying fog.

I was going to go onto the beach, but apparently 4 or so people died here recently when a "creeper wave" swept them out to sea.

Mini-tsunamis? 

My turn.

There was also a cliff nearby where I tried to get a scenic shot.  Stupid red truck just sat there the whole time.

Slightly different angle...

...and you can see that somebody is already feeling attention deprived.

We spent the night in the redwoods, which was pretty sweet.  There wasn't a whole lot of wind since the trees are so high.

Ritika is small, but next to a redwood, she's like a bug.

And then Ritika drove us the rest of the way back.  Next time - a little look around Seattle.