Welcome to Gaia! ::

I don't know how much y'all know or remember about my aversion to going absolutely anywhere when taking vacation but I decided to travel up to Seattle for an internet friend's wedding. Just got back.

It was my first time traveling via Airplane on my own. First time booking a hotel room. Not my first time renting a car but my first time driving a car in a completely different city (I've driven down to San Antonio twice but it's a lot like Austin. Seattle is very, very different.)

Let's see... other fun details... first time I got lost in a completely unknown town and had to stop to ask for directions. On the airplane when I chose to eat the Chicken Salad (I traveled First Class) it came with two pieces of shrimp. I hate seafood but decided that in the interest of doing new things I'd still eat them to revalidate my opinion. They didn't smell as bad as shrimp I normally smell, but they still tasted as bad as they smelled. Heh.

The weather up there... well, they were going through a "hot" and dry spell (west coast it, IIRC) which pretty much meant it didn't rain on me at all and was, instead, just like Texas spring weather. So nice.

If I go up again I'll try out the more local Fred Myer's store but I did some Walmart shopping up there for various food-related items. sweatdrop Bought a lot of bottled water for my hotel room fridge... that was a painful workout. Carried them out to my car which was parked far away. Parked in the back of the hotel near the door that's close to my room but that keycard reader is apparently finicky and didn't want to let me in so I had to carry the water around the hotel, then through the hotel... my arms are still sore!

Speaking of hotel, it's too bad the in-room hot tub didn't work. That would have been soooooo nice.

The wedding itself went pretty well. It was all a fun (but soooo tiring) adventure.

Oh, and potentially mentally ill homeless person in Jack in the Box. Was interesting.

What day was your Internet friend's wedding? Just curious since I was up in Seattle yesterday for Taylor Swift's concert and my friend and I passed two different newly weds doing their photoshoots.

I know how traveling on your own can be - exciting but a bit scary at the same time. I traveled down to L.A. in June by myself. That was my second time flying; the first was to go to Maui with my parents back in 2007.

What hotel did you stay at?

I wouldn't have seen you since I was up only for the day (Aug. 9). I live about a 3-hour drive from Seattle, so traveling there is a bit easier for me, and both my friend and I are used to grave-shift hours with working at the theater, so driving back home late at night was nothing for us. It helped too that we switched who was driving halfway when we stopped at a rest area.

I think the part that I was most anxious about when traveling by myself to L.A. was figuring out how to get my tickets and finding my way to the gate (or in the case of coming back home, figuring out where our new designated gate was due to delays). When I went to Maui, my Dad took care of all of that and I didn't pay too much attention to what he was doing. Plus I was anxious about where I needed to at LAX to find my shuttle bus that I reserved to be taken to the hotel I was staying at. Other than that, I wasn't too frightened by the fact that I was going to a city that I had never been to before. Probably helped that I did a bunch of research beforehand on how I was going to get to certain places and what not; so I felt a bit more confident adventuring around downtown L.A. as a result.
I think my parents, especially my Dad, was freaking out more about the whole trip than I was. My Dad is more of a homebody than me and not too adventurous - especially to big cities, so he was baffled on why I was even wanting to go. sweatdrop

The past couple years that my friend and I have gone up to Seattle for Emerald City Comicon, we've stayed at Crowne Plaza Seattle Downtown, so we can easily walk to where ever we want to go, whether it's the convention center, Pike Market/Waterfront, or take the monorail to go to EMP Museum.