We never did see our host last night - we heard someone come in around 11pm. But we did our things including breakfast and still didn't see him.
After our slow start we went to Susan's and chatted for a while. Then we jumped into their car and started another tour. First we headed into the Fremont district, which Susan says is uppity and strange along the lines of Austin TX. We stopped to get a picture of the Fremontster, a topiary dinosaur with a youngster. The Fremont Troll lives under the Aurora Avenue or WA-99 bridge, crushing a VW bus in his concrete left hand, so we took a picture of him/her/it also.
We stopped at Theo's chocolate factory's sales room to sample some of their wares and came out with a few. The Belgian place Susan wanted for lunch is closed this Tuesday and will be closed again Wednesday for an employee function. We're meeting our Inroad Ireland hosts for lunch Thursday so we'll have to do Belgian Friday. Susan says they have lots of good beers and they do gravy on french fries, etc. Hmmm…
Off then to lunch at 8oz Burgers. Quirky burgers, most of which stand 4" or so high. Really hard to wrap your jaw around one. The starters of tater tots & brussels sprouts were good also. So was the IPA from Bodhizaka.
We could look out the front window at all the development going on around here. The buy-a-house-knock-it-down-build-townhouses crowd is going wild. It's strange that most of the architecture and trimmings look alike, so you get a copycat effect no matter where you look.
But Susan took us off to the west end of Ballard to look over the sound from two or three parks. There were good views of boats and of Bainbridge Island. A rain squall could be seen coming our way but we went into a wetlands area anyway. A tree showed signs of beaver-gnawing and there were many more on the ground, so the little animal is busy. We retreated to the car just as the first drops fell.
She stopped at a little corner park where there are cement stools and counters with plaques showing the stores that existed on this corner in the past. There was also a cement living room suite, so Susan and D sat in it for pictures.
Then back to the house to sit and relax. I'm doing this page, then perhaps I'll go down the block to one of the six or seven local breweries for a sample. Susan says she's cooking tonight, so we'll describe that later.
Then we went to Susan's, she started dinner and Bryant came home around 6pm. We ate and then sort of faded. So D & I returned to 806d and relaxed. The owner, Ha, came in and greeted us. He's a Microsoft guy. I told him I was having a log-in problem on his network but then something came to me and i fixed it. He's very amenable. Originally from Vietnam, he has worked in Europe and the US as well.
