Getting Out of Dodge

When the highlight of your day is buying fish, it's not much of a day.  Well, the girls would argue the highlight was returning home to our dogs and being greeted by them as though we were gone for nearly a month.

As much as I enjoy traveling on vacation (and sometimes on business), I don't see how my friend Sam Van Voorhis and his family can go for 60 or 90 days like they do.  After the trip to Europe and now Alaska, I was ready to get home.

We rose early -- 5:30am -- packed, and then had breakfast as the ship pulled into Seattle.  Upon disembarking, we found a cab that we were Sikhing (guess what religion the cabbie is!).  I asked him to stop at Pike Place Market, whereupon I dashed out and ordered a whole salmon.  At first I entertained dreams of having bringing it back whole and grilling it, but realized travel would be easier with large filets in a smaller box.  Nonetheless, a 16 pound salmon is a thing of beauty (King, aka Chinook salmon). 

It's also fun when the fish market rousingly chants the order, and the guy throws it a good twenty feet to the preparer, who expertly catches it, to rousing cheers of the fans (I mean, tourists).  Any sentence where you can use "rousingly/rousing" twice in context is a good sentence.  It cost around $5 for the cabbie to wait, and another, much larger number for the fish -- but it's well worth it.  Bringing back salmon from the Pike Place Fish Market is like bringing back bagels from NYC, corn on the cob from Nelson County, VA, or smuggling two bottles of wine from Israel (hypothetically speaking, of course!).  You have to do it if you can.

Then we headed toward the airport, with Mt. Rainier even clearer and prettier than a week ago.  After that, we had nothing but time to kill.  After a month that covered six countries, parasailing, ice climbing, sea kayaking, hiking on the Eiger (not climbing, but hiking), salmon, bald eagles, whales, a bear, sea lions, eagles in Austria, palaces in Vienna, castles in Prague, it was weird to have nothing planned. 

But, hey it's good to be back home again, don't you know, sometimes this old house feels like a long lost friend.