Alone in a downtown

Pre-entry note:  I've been thinking some lately about this blog and how much I was engaged with it during the last Winter Olympics.  It was a different time in my life, to be sure.  Four years seems both quickly gone and very recent.  I'm not going to feel badly that the blog has lain fallow.  But I found myself (with only my iphone at hand--no laptop) thinking about an entry while on a trip this week.  So I wrote it down (pen and paper!) and submit it to the the blog maw for anyone's consideration.

What is it like to be alone in an unfamiliar downtown?

It depends on the city, really, doesn't it.

Some (most) have the obvious thing to do.  To wit:

Denver--The Mint

Louisville--The Bats

Seattle--The Needle

Don't read this as pejorative in some way.  I'm usually up for the obvious.  The more factual and historical, the better.  So picture me, then, bereft outside The Mint, unable to get a ticket and learn about all those coins.

Two Nevada coin asides:

1) Honey and I go to the site of the Carson City Mint after a breakfast of pancakes, after a truly hellish night in Virginia City.  Unless it's the Irma in Cody, WY, give 19th century hotels--however quaint you think they'll be--a pass.  They will be hot or cold or startlingly both.  They will be loud.  You will not sleep.  All of what I have said is especially true of The Silver Queen in Virgina City, NV.  Virginia City MAY be worth a drive-through look at the Bucket O'Blood casino and saloon, but not more.  Not even a little bit more.

I wanted more from Carson City, mint wise, but I was tired and perhaps compensatingly over-carbed.

2)  During the early days of the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas was in a period where high-end properties were all about museums as part of the experience.  Museums make thing high class, don't you know. The Bellagio had Steve Wynn's own art collection.  Not to be outdone, Mandalay Bay opened with a featured museum to money.  Appropriate?  You bet.  (Ha!).

So, Honey and I dutifully paid our admission and were given those hand held recorder sticks.  Wands.  Whatever.  You push the number of the display and a deep voice intones from the stick about the coin in front of you.  There was a coin set off by itself in a glass case.  When we approached we discovered it was a nickel.  The stick then began what seemed like 90 minutes of narration about the nickel.

We both gave up on the nickel before it was done.  It was a rare and important nickel.  It was also--there's just no getting around this--a nickel.

(Ok, I just looked it up--because being snotty about a nickel doesn't mean it's not important.  It was a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel, one of only 5 known in the world.  They were not supposed to be in circulation, but somehow 5 of them got into collector's hand.  Liberty Head nickels were regular nickels from 1882 to 1912.  In 1913 a rouge Mint employee stuck five 1913 Liberty Heads.  One of the five most recently sold (2007) for $5 million.  It's quite the nickel).

To rejoin me alone in downtowns...

A few years ago, I had a trip to Denver.  The Mint Tour was full.  I "replaced" it with a tour of Molly Brown's house (she of the unsinkable) which I left halfway through.  My trip to the Louisville Slugger bat factory paled next to the massage at the spa Treecup found that trip.

I try, you see, to be a good conference attendee.  I really do, but somehow I am compelled to wander away sometimes.

So, Thursday I wandered Seattle.

I had high hopes.  No rain.  A cool Pacific Northwest City.

And then, well, there's the Space Needle Dream™.  I've had it for years.  Not every night.  But once or twice a year.

Here's how it goes.  I'm in Seattle.  How do I know?  I just do.  It looks like my brain thinks Seattle should look.

When I touched down at SeaTac on Thursday, it was my first moment in Washington State.  Why have I been dreaming of a place I'd never been?  I'll leave that to the symbolgists and psychologists.

Anyway, in the Space Needle Dream™, I need to get to the top of the Space Needle.  I can't get there.  I try and try and can't even get close.  There's something important up there.  A Space Needle Dream™ secret.


So Thursday afternoon, I landed and took a cab with a colleague to the hotel.  She left to meet her sister for dinner, so I feel ok about missing the opening talk and head off to the Needle.  I take the mid-60s monorail to get there.

I paid my $17 and rode the elevator (41 seconds) to the top.  The sun was setting behind the Puget Sound.  I circumnavigated the outside deck, the inside deck and stared off into every direction I could.

I then called Honey.

"Will I know the secret message when I see it?"

"Maybe it's in the needle part"

"Well, that's problematic, because I'm in the round part and can't get there."

I do like modernist architecture.  I enjoyed the monorail ride back, where I looked at the Needle from below.

I then walked several hundred vertical miles (ok, 12 blocks) up a mountain (ok, up Capitol Hill) to buy some good coffee.  (Victrola, Stumptown (a Portland import), and Vivace) for enjoyment back in the blessedly flat San Fernando Valley.

I enjoyed my beer and burger for dinner and wrote this blog in my moleskine with a blue gel pen.  (How quaint).

It was a tiring afternoon (no lunch didn't help), but the people seemed nice and everything was open.  (Take that, Denver!)

The next day I went to Pike Place market and to REI mothership.

The secret is still out there somewhere.  Problem is that now I don't even know where to look.  But I'm sure I'll find myself in another downtown at some point and I'll wander.



As for the Space Needle Dream™, maybe I was wrong.  Maybe it wasn't Seattle after all.  Could the secret be in Brussels at the Atomium?  Do you think they have any conferences there?