West Coast Adventure - Day 10

A day of rest....riiiiiiight. :)

I woke up this morning without a riding agenda. I've ridden enough miles to warrant an oil change and service check, so the biggest agenda item of the day was taking care of that. I was smart enough to plan this out and my hotel is less than a mile from the dealership I was going to drop Black Max off at to have the work done. Yay for walking!

As luck would have it, the hotel is also just a few doors down from a shop that repairs eyeglasses. Lucky, you ask? I managed to do yesterday morning what I'd been threatening to do for 8 straight days. I broke my glasses. I have to take them off when I put my helmet on or take it off. This usually involves setting them down on top of my travel bags until the helmet is either on or off and then putting them back on. I have, on more than one occasion on this trip, put my helmet on, gotten on the bike and driven off with my glasses sitting on top of the bags behind me. The shortest distance I've made it before remembering this is just a few feet, the longest was several miles. As I was preparing to leave Spokane yesterday, I remembered while I was still in the parking lot...but...in the process of stopping to retrieve them, the glasses slide forward, off the bags, onto the ground, right where I then proceeded to put my foot. Broken glasses ensued. So, on my walk back to the hotel I noticed this shop that said they repair glasses, I figured I'd give it a shot. $69 dollars and a few drops of solder later, I'm back in business. :) The true challenge is figuring out how to prevent this from happening again...stay tuned...

While Black Max was getting lubed and checked, I decided I'd stop at the local grocery store to pick up some snacks. Pal-Do World is right across the street from the shop where I'd dropped my glasses off, so I popped on in to see what I could see. I should have known I was in for a fun experience when the only thing I could actually read on the store sign were the words "Pal-Do World." Everything else was written in what I believe may have been Korean. The only area I really ran into issues was in the "salty" snacks. Most of the bags didn't have much English on them. The two words that were in English that kept popping up were prawn and shrimp...I've had prawn/shrimp flavored snacks before and I knew I didn't want any today. I finally found a small bag of some kind of chocolate puff, some wasabi rice crackers, dried mango, and candied tamarind. I've never had tamarind before, but it looked tasty. I also picked up a couple Granny Smith apples...there was no language barrier in figuring out what those were. :)

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was feeling a bit peckish, so, I cracked open that bag of tamarind to see what it was I'd bought. I popped one of the pods into my mouth and bit down, quickly realizing this wasn't going to be the way to eat candied tamarind.  The candid flesh is sugary, soft, and chewy. The seeds inside the pod are as hard as rocks. I'm glad I didn't break a tooth. Turns out you eat what you can and spit the seeds in the trash. Not the kind of "candy" you'd serve at a posh dinner party, but no one cares if you spit seeds in the trash in your hotel room. :) If I ever run across candied tamarind while shopping back home, I might actually buy some...it's not bad, really...it's high in B vitamins and calcium. Who needs milk when you can eat tamarind?

I got the call at about 1:00 that Black Max was all ready to go. So I hiked back to the dealship to pick him up. Now all I had to do was figure out what to do with the rest of the day. I had plans to meet my cousin, Jonathon, and his wife for dinner at about 6:30, so I now had 5 hours to roam the greater Seattle area. It didn't take me long to come up with a plan. Did you know there are 5 Apple Stores in the greater Seattle area? Now you do...and I visited every one of them.
No, this doesn't have to make sense to you. It's just something I like doing. It's also something my friend Jason likes doing...and now I've got 5 more stores on my list than he does. :) In my list of Apple stores that I've visited, these five are numbers 19 to 23. In some cases just finding the store is a challenge in and of itself. Driving around in a large, unfamiliar city can be challenging. One way streets that don't make sense, streets that aren't always labeled the same in real life as they are on the internet, etc., etc., etc. In the end, it took me over four and a half hours to get to each store and actually walk in and look around. If you don't walk in and look around it doesn't actually count as a visit. Besides, it can be fun to see what accessories the varying stores carry. I'm noticing a lot designer phone cases and golfing accessories out here that you don't see in the stores back home.

After visiting the last Apple store, I headed back into Seattle to visit Jonathon and Nicole. It was good to see them, spend a little time catching up, and enjoying some great fellowship over Pad Thai, Red Curry, and Chinese sausage salad.

So, the big question is, how many miles can one rack up traipsing from one Apple Store to another in a metropolitan area like this.  The answer is 132.

Tomorrow will come early (it's actually already tomorrow...I should get to bed) and it will be the day I finally get to see the Pacific coast.

Tomorrow is another day and another road. :)