One landmark that appears often in our pictures is the Seattle P-I Globe. That’s no surprise, since it dwells between our window and the photogenic Olympic Peninsula.  How the globe got there in the first place is another matter though.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the successor to Seattle’s very first newspaper, the Seattle Gazette, founded in 1863.  Eighty-five years later, the globe was created to adorn the paper’s then-new headquarters, at Sixth Avenue and Wall Street. The diameter of the globe is 30 feet, and then there’s that 18 foot eagle perched on top. The slogan “It’s in the P-I,” in red neon, still sometimes revolves around its equator.

Eventually, the P-I lost ground to its cross-park rival, the Seattle Times.  Starting in 1983 the two papers were both printed by the Times under a joint operating agreement, and so the  P-I had less need for floorspace.  They moved down toward the waterfront, taking their globe with them, and that’s why it’s in our line of sight.  Since 2009 the P-I is online only.

Here at our house we’ve been worried about losing our view of the globe.  It’s not that the thing is going anywhere — the Museum of History and Industry, which now owns it, doesn’t have any place else to put it.  But our neighborhood is strewn with one-, two- and three-story buildings that are ripe for re-development (we lost our partial view of Mt. Rainier to a big apartment building, for instance). One day a construction crane appeared near the globe, and soon a wooden structure began to rise.

But we tracked the new building down, to Warren Avenue, across First from where I think the Cascadia Tavern used to be.  It’s wedge-shaped and yellow, and full of holes on the side away from us.  We were glad to find it topped out at a visually safe height.  Its complexion is still subject to change, but I’m sure it will always be the Swiss Cheese Building to us.

Up close, the globe itself is more imposing:

Here is the globe from the other side:

What we really want, of course, is to fly as we would in our dreams.

Waking life offers us various aspects of that experience.  Parachute jumping provides a bird’s-eye view of the earth, the brief sensation of weightlessness, and the chance to control movement through subtle gestures.  This last bit, it turns out, may be conveniently enjoyed indoors.

I found myself with a free day in nearby Tukwila, home of the Seattle location of iFLY, one of about fifty of their vertical wind tunnels wordwide.  It happens that even unlikely-looking humans can be made to levitate, and can begin to acquire some skills right away.  (Some restrictions apply:  they ask about history of heart trouble, back injuries or shoulder dislocations.  You see me wearing one white glove because I was unable to remove a ring from that hand.  They are understandably wary of debris in their 140 m.p.h. slipstream.)

There’s much of the magic of soaring, and without the encumbrance of an aircraft.  It’s inspiring just to watch the instructors, like Josh, the guy in the red suit above, who flies as well as any animated superhero.  The International Bodyflight Association has videos showing you how it’s done.  And by the way, some of the other thrills of jumping can be added back in.  Any flight can include a quick trip up to the top of the tunnel.  And virtual reality can take the flyer to popular skydiving sites, or for a wingsuit ride.

Home turf of the Hanseatic League, later the heart of a Swedish empire, for decades a sort of liquid Iron Curtain; why not spend a couple weeks on the Baltic Sea? We combined this idea with a Backroads bicycle trip that included passage aboard an innovative new ship.

We first spent some time on our own in Stockholm, as previously reported; that entry includes a link to an account of our visits to a couple of Baltic islands that gave us our first closeup look at this inland sea.

The Baltic is different in several ways from other large bodies of water. On its surface, especially toward the north and east, it’s composed of fresh water bound for the ocean. At its Danish outlet, there’s salty water flowing in underneath, mixing only slowly with the brackish water above. The Baltic isn’t big enough to have significant tides of its own, and is protected from the tides of the Atlantic. One other big difference from, say, the Mediterranean, is the northerly location. During some winters the Baltic freezes over from end to end. We were careful to confine our visit to the month of August.

Unreasonably good weather allowed us to enjoy a lot of scenery.  The picture at the top of the page is a look aft as we enter the harbor at Helsinki, our first stop after leaving Stockholm.  It’s a great place for cycling, with waterside paths through birch forests.

The panorama below is from our ship’s berth in St. Petersburg.  A craft our size is welcome right in the midst of things.  That’s the gold dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral on the right, and just this side of the second bridge that’s the garden of the Winter Palace.

Our ship’s location, right there on the English Embankment, wasn’t the advantage that one might have supposed, though.  These days, travelers from many nations, including the U.S., aren’t allowed ashore unless they have a guide or a special visa, obtained in advance.  We contented ourselves this time with guided outings (and memories from our visit by train in May of 2000).

So biking in St. Petersburg was done with a local company, and using their little folding commuter bikes.  (Alex and I managed to snag bicycles with bigger wheels, but weren’t any the happier for it.)

Divided into small groups and given tiny bicycles, a Backroads tour is still likely to block a thoroughfare. Here we gawk at St. Isaac’s. The big sculpture in the background is a wedding bouquet — the happy couple pose at left.

The need to use local bicycles points out another interesting thing about the trip. Our concept of the Backroads bike tour dates back to our first outing, in 1995, in the Gulf Islands.  We envision two bright young leaders, one riding herd while the other drives a van along the route, providing water, snacks, repair service and perhaps the occasional lift when desired.  Every couple of days a bus may materialize to move the entire group from one general location to the next.

On that first trip there happened to be only five guests.  Later we would see a dozen, then two dozen, and eventually, on the Baltic cruise, forty.  This has led to some big changes — one consequence being the difficulty of picking out “your” bicycle from among the fleet.  (This task is eased only slightly by the fact that there are now more kinds of bicycles.)

But on this voyage, several factors meant that guests, vehicles, bicycles and some of the staff progressed along the course in different supply chains.  Sometimes the bikes traveled by land or ferry and met us in port; other times, they had no choice but to gain passage with us.  Support staff changed with changing venues.  The relationship between steamship line and tour company is a new one (and the ship is itself brand-new):  a method for crating up the bikes had to be invented, shortly before the first customers arrived.  The logistics went off amazingly well.  (Ours was the “return” section of the ship’s maiden cruise from Copenhagen — the various bike routes had already been run once, but in reverse order.)

From St. Petersburg, past Krohnshtadt and Kotkin Island, land trails off gradually

To the tourist, much will seem familiar.  Some architecture looks picturesque, but mostly just because it’s older.  Restaurants offer lots of seafood, but none of it seems alien.  There’s the possibility of hearing a Finnic language spoken (we skipped Uralic Latvia and Lithuania) but Slavic and North Germanic prevail, and English is now accepted everywhere.

The end of August, from the world’s longest wooden pier, in Sopot, near Gdansk.

There could be a mild surprise in store for bird watchers who have not been to northern or eastern Europe before.  Crows here act the same, and they sound the same, but they look different.  They’re best described as gray with black wings and heads. 

They’re the hooded crow (Corvus cornix), the first crow named by Linnaeus.  We don’t have good pictures because the adults are too wary to get within cellphone camera range.  The young ones are naive (we were able to feed one in Tallinn) but they start out dark all over and so do not display the color difference well.  All baby crows have blue eyes, but these are startlingly pale.

You’d have to look closely, but the picture below actually shows a ship approaching a navigation light.  As intimate a sea as the Baltic is, it’s still vast enough to make humans look insignificant.

Our cruise ended in Copenhagen.  This is what you’d like your bike path to look like!  Half of the city’s workforce commutes by bicycle, so when it snows, the bike paths are cleared first.  Our ship is docked just on the other side of the building to the right.

Cruise ships have put  on a lot of weight in recent years.  But, wait!  What if, instead of trying to shoehorn a small city into a floating island, you took a yacht and scaled it up a bit?  Le Dumont d’Urville is the newest of the dozen ships owned by the French line Ponant, and one of four its size named for explorers.  (Jules Dumont d’Urville mapped much of the coast of Australia, and gave Micronesia and Melanesia their names.  And Adelie Land, in Antarctica, after his wife.  And thus the penguins also.)

The Norwegian Bliss, which ties up in our Seattle neighborhood every weekend during the summer, carries over 4,000 passengers, and has a five-hole golf course and a go-kart track.  With 92 cabins, Le Dumont d’Urville expects to carry about 170.  Its ice-strengthened hull is less than 60 feet wide and, better yet, draws only 15 feet, meaning access to a lot more of the world’s shoreline.  The deck around the little plunge pool at the stern folds out cleverly to launch Zodiacs or kayaks.  By the way, chow is another matter that can be confidently entrusted to the French.

One last look at our ship — it’s the tiny white blip in the exact center of this photograph.

It would be irresistible, if only for its visual appeal, like the set of a period movie — Stockholm has backdrops for nearly any era you like, since its buildings go back to the 13th Century. We settled in at the Grand Hotel (1874).  That’s the one with the flags in the panorama below — the Royal Palace is on our right hand just out of frame.

Another way to think about architecture is to mosey down to ArkDes, Sweden’s National Center for Architecture and Design, to the left of that three-masted ship, where we found a big exhibit of architectural models, in an inventive space. Skeppsholmen, the island it’s on, is littered with museums, so we looked at some other art as well.

It’s not just the waterfront that has these staid edifices.  We walked up to the observatory atop Vasastan and, though we saw some modern commercial buildings along the way, it was obvious that plenty of charm remains.  Here’s a view to the southeast, I think:  

Sometimes our wanderings were food-directed.  We ate at two places on tourist-dense old-town Gamla Stan, first a cozy little bar and then at Under Kastanjen (shown below), named for that big chestnut tree, basically a bakery with extra seating — though less seating than befits its popularity with locals and visitors combined.  There’s a sort of a bar downstairs, and, on its optional gluten-free menu, both the traditional meatballs (with the traditional lingonberries) and the fika-worthy oat-and-cocoa balls.

Other wonderful meals depended more on chance.  We stumbled upon a sweet little neighborhood creperie in Sodermalm when the one we were planning on decided to change its opening time.  We ended up at Oaxen Krog on Djurgården because that’s where we also ran out of steam while exploring that fabled island.

Djurgården earned its name as the royal game preserve, and today is a kind of in-city destination resort, with a couple of marinas, half a dozen museums, an amusement park, a school, and big wooded or open spaces with a web of footpaths popular among joggers.  Private residences!  A riding academy!  It was close enough to walk from our hotel — but not so close as to walk back, so we took the water taxi that leaves from the dock right next to the ABBA museum.

A bonus!  Right after our arrival on the island, I was inspired to film this three-minute-long fable of resoluteness, redemption, and the perils of modern living, “The Commons.”

We did not limit ourselves to strolling and dining.  We went paddling out in the islands, a trip described in our kayak blog, Sea Creatures.  We took the tour of the Royal Apartments, like any good tourists, and the Treasury.  It had not occurred to me that the first time any noble is welcomed at Court, a new batch of splendid insignia and regalia needs to be created, which, over the centuries, can really accumulate.

Back when we first started traveling, I would send postcards to my colleagues in the States to share with them various visions of municipal employment in other parts of the world.  While laboring in a refurbished department store or a future car dealership, they might be treated to a picture of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris or the Mirabell Palace in Salzburg, or Seville’s Ayuntamiento.

Here in that same spirit is a look at Stockholm’s Town Hall. It’s basically a big brick building, like the old offices above the fire station in Spokane.  But on a somewhat grander scale.  And a little closer to the water.  Oh, and, the Nobel Banquet is given here annually, after presentation of the awards for literature and the sciences.

When we finally left Stockholm, it was only to to join a cruise that would take us around the Baltic Sea, with stops for daily bicycling. A farewell to the Grand Hotel!  (Where, by the way, the Nobel Banquet was held until 1930.)

Iceland’s appeal starts with its geology — it’s the only spot where, with dry feet, you can see the meeting of the North Atlantic Plate and the Eurasian Plate — or rather, see their parting. This rift in the earth’s crust offers active volcanoes, and geothermal heat for communal bathing or radical environmentalism; plus a beautifully stark and frequently changing landscape.

It’s a landscape that’s closely linked to a twelve-hundred-year human history, recorded from the very beginning with gossip-column granularity in the Old Norse sagas and other works. They describe the early days of a crowd-sourced DIY justice system and what is now the world’s longest-running parliament. For a lapsed medievalist and sometime student of jurisprudence, this stuff is catnip.

Reykjavik’s working harbor includes museums and a modern concert hall.

There’s even more to recommend the country though. It’s one of those places where people go to watch for the Northern Lights, for example. Icelandair promotes the island as the ideal stopover on any transatlantic journey. The growth of tourism means that good food and accommodations are easy to find — though they may be pricey.  After all, most things that don’t contain wool, fish, or lava need to be brought in from far away.

Thus, traditional fare is somewhat idiosyncratic. We were offered whale. And foal!  And — puffin!  We declined all of these, on the basis of either sympathy or scarcity. It’s worth noting that the small, stalwart Iceland horses, their bloodlines traced as carefully as those of the Vikings, are thought by some to be about twice as numerous as really necessary, perhaps because others join us in refusing to dine at their expense.

One surprising example of local plenty is the tomatoes grown at Friðheimar. The big indoor farm there uses geothermal heat for energy, cold well water for irrigation, and, at any one time, hundreds of workers brought in from the Netherlands.

In white cardboard boxes. Because they’re bumblebees!  The bees, the yards-tall columnar plants, and soup-slurping tourists cheerfully share a one-and-a-quarter-acre greenhouse. Cucumbers are grown there as well and, I suspect, basil.  And those sturdy little horses, right next door.

We can’t claim to have toured the island thoroughly. We had some of our bike stuff with us though, on our way to a different trip, and we rode around the capital with Reykjavik Bike Tours.  On another day, they took us with some mountain bikes out to the Westman Isles, site of one of the earliest human occupations (and the first visit by a foreign scholar).

What a thrill, on that excursion also, to hear the story of Njals Saga retold by our guide, though in somewhat abbreviated form, virtually within sight of Njall’s home at Bergþórshvoll and Gunnar’s at Hlíðarendi.  All but perhaps the oldest Icelanders speak perfect English, by the way, thanks in part to American Forces Television, which arrived in 1951.

On that same outing we visited the town of Eyrarbakki, once a bustling port but now, after the consolidation of the fishing industry elsewhere, mostly a monument to an earlier lifestyle.  It’s the location of the country’s largest prison too, currently home to some of the bankers who helped to precipitate the 2008 financial collapse.  I was moved to observe that Americans, who value deceit more highly, gave their bankers bonuses instead of sentences.

Icelanders are proud of their past, and are good-natured about their tourist-intensive present.  The future is uncertain but they’re in a better position than people in a lot of other places, with a seemingly limitless source of clean energy.

The effects of a warming climate can be seen within their borders, but the causes lie mostly without.  Glaciers currently cover about 11 percent of Iceland; in 2014, the first one of them was downgraded to a snowfield:  it’s no longer thick enough to flow as ice.  In August, while we were there, the former glacier was commemorated with a bronze plaque. The text is “A letter to the future:”

. . . In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

Of course one of the things that may need to be done, is a lot less air travel.  With Greta Thunberg sailing, instead of flying, to the U.S. at about the same time, we were beginning to notice some flygskam.  We’re hoping to do more rail travel in the future.  I feel lucky that Iceland is one of the places that we got to visit.

Back to the subject of bumblebees, here’s one we found at work near Reykjavik’s city hall.  I thought at first that it might be one of the guest-workers who had been out-placed, but the gray abdomen suggests that it is Bombus hypnorum, the New Garden Bumblebee, arrived this century from mainland Europe.  The bumblebee of agriculture is B. terrestris,  the Buff-Tailed Bumblebee, which sports a second ginger stripe and a fascinating sociology.  I think we saw some of them on a later part of our trip, in Sweden.

I wasn’t sure I would ever drive through the new Downtown Tunnel.  Our home lies part-way along its route, meaning that we would ordinarily have to backtrack to get to either portal.  Our kayak, though, dwells at Salmon Bay, well to the north; so a trip to any of the beaches in the south part of Puget Sound may conveniently include motoring through the tunnel with the boat on top — at least until the toll kicks in, some time later this summer.

The birth of the tunnel is linked to the demise of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and that process has a ways to go yet.  Some parts are still standing, while others are completely gone:  the effect is like the isolated buttes that persisted during the street regrades a century ago.  The legacy section in this first picture survives because of its involvement with the Columbia Street pedestrian walkway from downtown to the ferry docks (which are themselves being made-over, as the seawall recently has been).  The land that the remnant stands on did not exist when the Denny Party arrived; it was later made from fill.

Fill is now the destiny of the viaduct itself.  When it was decided that the rubble would be placed in the now-empty Battery Street Tunnel, I imagined that trucks would busy themselves backing in and dumping their loads in the darkness.  But no, the choice was made to funnel the debris in from the top.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see those long trucks rumbling by our house.

I caught up with one of the trucks between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. To the pedestrian, it was always the grates in the sidewalk that marked the underground path of Highway 99 — but the narrower openings in the middle of the roadway are, naturally, where the dust goes in. The truck pulls up next to a big metal quarter-pipe-like trough, a spray of water materializes to suppress airborne particulates, and the hopper of the truck lurches sideways to dump its load into the old tunnel below the street.  There’s a video here of such a truck dumping its load, a block away between Third and Fourth Avenues.

Below is my mid-80s picture of the Viaduct from near the Pike Place Market, heading south toward the unsuspecting Kingdome (itself reduced to rubble in 2000) and then veering around to the right:

It’s always had a fragmented existence: Eighth Avenue got tangled up in Seattle’s highway construction boom back in the Sixties, and today it threads implausibly first above Freeway Park and then, immediately thereafter, beneath the Washington State Convention Center.  It’s shown below emerging briefly into the sunlight of Pike Street, only to confuse a couple of tourists before diving back under the Grand Hyatt.

The complexities do not end here, because a block further north the avenue enters the Denny Triangle, intersecting at once with both Olive and Howe, streets from two different grid systems.  Then, within the next half mile, Eighth crosses Westlake Avenue at yet another angle and finally pauses at Denny Park, Seattle’s oldest park and the home of the Parks Department administrative offices.

The first part of this stretch seems pretty placid.  The photo below shows a leafy Eighth flowing between the new U.S. District Courthouse, seen on the left beyond the red brick building, and the Seattle Police Department West Precinct, the short, blocky building a block further along on the right.  The bike lane is a nice touch, but cycle track on the adjacent 7th and 9th will carry a lot more traffic. You can see the trees of Denny Park at the end of the street, and Queen Anne Hill beyond.

This part of town has not always been so refined.  In 1975, up there near where Westlake crosses, across from where the police station is now, I worked at a place called Kangaroo Color Labs, in a building that had formerly been a knitting mill.  Denim magnate M. Genauer was next door at some point.  Roffe’s Shoes had a big building a couple blocks south, on the block with the Greyhound terminal, and nearby there was a music store, that is, a store that sold sheet music. There were used car lots all around, plus new Chevys and Plymouths, and a couple blocks north a bar called The Joker.

Viewed from the north, the march of progress is even more apparent. In this photo, taken from just south of Denny Way last February, cranes can be seen working in the street. The low building on the left was a Korean restaurant; it’s closed now, but its sign still marks this corner, as it has since the Seventies. The near building under construction on the right, where you can see a reflection of the Space Needle, spans the width of the block stretching over to Seventh Avenue, where Bob Murray’s Dog House stood for decades.

Of course there’s more to Eighth than just the downtown part. North of Denny Park, it’s 8th Avenue North, the street that Glazer’s Camera was on (and is again). Eighth currently fails to cross Mercer, but is reborn at Roy (there’s another big construction project just getting underway there).  When the street reaches Lake Union it turns sharply east to intersect with Westlake yet again, just at the Kenmore Air terminal.

Back where we started, at Freeway Park but facing the other direction, Eighth heads southeast for half a mile, stopping short of Harborview Medical Center. Fantastically, a block marked “8th Avenue” sprouts up again, only to connect 9th Avenue, Fir Street, and S. Washington St in a big arc. Then 8th Avenue S. appears magically on the other side of the freeway, running due south through the International District to the big I-5/I-90 interchange.

By the way, here’s what “my” old block of Eighth looks like today. Our back is to the excellent Bounty Kitchen, and note Seattle’s first Shake Shack at far right.  The Amazon Spheres are a nice addition to the neighborhood.

We spent the first half of March back at Loreto Bay, after a five-year absence.  The carefree tourist experience was quite enjoyable!  This may be due in part to the fact that our friends Leif and Susan had kept one of our old kayaks for us, gave us mountain bikes to keep for the whole time we were there, kept us company, and drove us to inaccessible places for hiking.

I was reminded, flying in, how vast and rugged are the mountains of Baja California. Visitors have been doing more and more exploring recently, mostly finding routes that the locals and their livestock have been using for decades.  Some of us had hiked up the slot canyon near Ligüi years before, but this time we took the trail along the parallel ridge instead:

On another day we drove up the arroyo San Telmo, thinking to hike a trail there that we hadn’t seen before, but we were driven back by the wind.  It had been quiet for the first part of our stay, and allowed us to kayak on most mornings; but when the Loreto wind gets serious, it can stop most of us creatures in our tracks.  I did manage to bring back from that trip a picture of a handsome fig tree, seen at right.  A human (me) is included for scale.

Another activity normally available despite the wind is dining.  Two of our favorite restaurants in the whole world are on the coast north or south of town.  How heartwarming to have a waiter remember your preferences, or an owner remark on just how long you’ve been away!  (I suspect that Alejandro may have been coached.)

It’s not clear that Loreto Bay has been perfected yet, but it has certainly matured a great deal. There’s shade now here and there, a separate library close to the community center, more owners than construction workers about on the streets. Some of the units in the Posadas are occupied.  The supermercado El Portón, which once seemed like a lifeline and a stepping stone to the backcountry, has closed; but two little stores persist within the development, one of them owned by Pedro Lopez, the local restaurateur and delicatessen owner. The cook at the restaurant there turns out to be Rose, the lady who used to help take care of our garden.

Transportation is another aspect that’s changed a lot. The trans-peninsular highway has been widened from the town to the bridge at El Tular, just short of Nopoló. Gone is the rancho through whose gate we used to access the foothills; but on the other hand, I have met the guy who is building the big storage units in its place now. Parking at Loreto Bay has again become a problem, and has been given a new solution with angled spaces on the west side of the Paseo.  The new trend in bicycle travel is fat-tired beach bikes — you still get plenty of exercise, but more time can be spent in pedaling and less in pushing.

Leif contemplates the view toward Loreto Bay.

The original Loreto Bay concept envisioned most owners renting out their homes when away, through the developer itself; but a change in structure resulted in something of a free-for-all.  We rented a house with a floorplan essentially like our old one, but a block closer to the water — in fact, it’s the one where our friends John and Ruth used to stay when they came down. I liked the traditional configuration, with the extra patio at the bedroom end — it seemed a lot more private than our old place with its big side yard. Check-in didn’t go smoothly — it’s a good thing we had friends nearby and already knew our way around.  One of the security guards is a fellow we used to chat with when we walked in the evening taking our census of the gecko population.

The town of Loreto itself is reassuringly familiar.  Once-endless work on the Malecon is finally finished.  I was glad to see the guy who cleans windshields in the parking lot at El Pescador — his existence seemed precarious when I first met him a dozen years ago. The frutería that we once considered essential is long closed.  On one of our last nights we dined at the relatively new “Mi Loreto.”  It needed pointing out to me that this was the old juice bar El Cañaveral, once a favorite cycling destination, and where we used to buy our lemons, but now with more walls — for protection from the wind.

Here are a few more snapshots. For the dolphin pictures, you’ll need to visit our other blog.

By the way, one of the very first things I saw when we got to Loreto Bay was my old bicycle, parked by the security office.  It has a kick-stand now!  What an amazing link to our days under the desert sun.

Western Washington got an unusual amount of snow early in February, but downtown at least it never got very deep.  Alex and I coped by stocking up beforehand and then mostly not emerging for a week. Here’s footage of some nice big flakes, from the night of the 10th.

As of this moment, Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct and Battery Street Tunnel are closed forever, to be replaced by another tunnel bypassing downtown altogether.

So we just finished riding all three of these on our bikes — and by “we” I mean Alex and I and about 12,000 other people, in a giant era-changing celebration organized by the Cascade Bicycle Club.

Where the Viaduct met the old tunnel.

Fortunately, the start/finish was just a few blocks from home.  The tunnel’s northern portal is part of a maze of public and private construction that has for years been re-shaping South Lake Union, and which on this day again permits crossing State Route 99 on Harrison Street, for the first time since 1954.

It was the Nisqually earthquake of 2001, though, that spelled the end for the Viaduct.  Damage left the structure unsafe until repairs could be made, and foretold what would happen in the bigger event that is sure to come. Years were spent debating replacement options, and then more years nursing the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine along deep beneath downtown, and now — after a three-week closure of a major highway — an 18-year overnight success!  (The celebration day for pedestrians was yesterday — there were nearly 100,000 of them. about the number of vehicles the road used to carry.)

Riders exiting the Downtown Tunnel’s south entrance.

The viaduct was one of those things that people loved to complain about.  Our Governor recently said that it separated the city from its own heart (the waterfront).  But the viaduct was really handy for going places, and, once you were downtown, it provided shade in the summer and protection from the rain for the other 90 percent of the year.  The new tunnel will be a magic carpet for somebody who lives on Queen Anne Hill and works somewhere south of the stadiums, like I used to — but there’s no place in between to get on or off.  Anyone who lives or works downtown — or delivers produce to the Pike Place Market — may be looking for a new route.  The distance from the city to its “heart” will remain the same, but now will include, at grade, much of the old traffic.

The whole trip was about thirteen miles, including our brief commute, and only took a couple hours; we were back home by about 11 A.M.  The weather was cold for Seattle, being in the 30s, beginning to cool off following an unusually warm January.  I wore nearly all my winter gear and it was more than adequate in spots, there being 800 feet of elevation gain, at grades up to 6 percent.  By three in the afternoon we noticed that it had started snowing — in time for Seattle’s historic first rush hour with its new Downtown Tunnel.

Below is a panorama from June, 2017, showing the top deck of the Viaduct on the right and, on the left, a new staging area for tourists ready to descend upon the waterfront.