I really wanted to take Kathy to Friday Harbor for her birthday, but the timing from Port Townsend just didn’t work, either a long waiting time or not enough time to make it onto the next ferry; so we opted for a trip to Seattle. The ferry system takes a bit to get used to. Only some of the routes you need to make reservations, but those are not tickets, just $10 each reservation. It’s unclear if that money is applied to your ticket or not. It may just be charged if you are a no-show, but that wasn’t clear either. Also, to get to Friday Harbor, you have to take two ferries, and the second ferry is over an hour drive from the first ferry landing. It’s an all-day thing, and the best route I could find wouldn’t have gotten us back to the coach till after 10 pm after leaving around 8 am. Sounded too much like work to Kathy. I had to agree. Although it’s only just getting dark at 10 pm.
So we opted to drive in to Seattle, just one ferry ride, no reservations needed. It’s about an hour drive to the ferry on 
Bainbridge Island and then it was about a half hour’s wait to get on. While waiting I walked over to the water and snapped a picture of a couple spare ferry’s parted just south of us.
It always amazes me how many cars and trucks can get on one of these “real” ferries. It reminded me of that Monday night Larkspur ferry, except this time it was zillions of cars and trucks streaming out for a long time. There were lots of pedestrians too, but they were up on an overhead walk so you had to look for them. They vehicles were right in your face.
Finally, the first row got the signal. We were in the fourth row, but it was just a few minutes and we were heading onto the ramp down to the ship. Turns out Kathy made a video while I was driving on. There was so much glare, I had difficulty seeing the guys directing me till my windshield went into a shadow, and then they were pointing me in two directions. I chose to the right.
We parked and walked up two flights to the sun deck where it was a gorgeous sunny morning with a cool breeze. I headed up toward the bow to snap some pics. We could see Seattle way off in the distance. As soon as the ship got out near the Sound, it got really windy, 
making it difficult to keep the camera steady. It took about a half hour to cross the Sound and land right downtown. The crew has this down to a science. The chime went off, then the speakers announced it was time to get back to our cars. We weren’t in the car more than 2 minutes before I had to start it and move off the ferry. A very efficient operation.
We headed out to find the Pike Marketplace. I had been there once before on a business trip back in 1998 or so. It was a Wednesday afternoon and the place was packed. Even the streets around it were packed with people that seemed oblivious that there were cars driving around them. Somehow as we turned onto the street right in front of the market, a car started backing out of a 
space. My first assumption, it was probably a handicap spot. But it wasn’t, must have been our lucky day. We pulled in about 15 minutes later as that’s how long it took the folks to back out with all the people walking around their car like they didn’t exist, and then them doing the same to me as I inched forward toward the spot. It took so long I was thinking I wouldn’t get there in this lifetime.
We got out and walked over toward a small park at the north end. By then it was just about lunchtime and the park was crowded with people. Dusty found just the right tree and all was good with the world again. We crossed back across the street and entered the market. Must be a great place for pickpockets, as “really crowded” was a huge understatement.
They sell all sorts of junk in there. Surprisingly there were even a 
few produce sellers in the mix of jewelry, soap, pictures, clothes shops, and artsy things. We found a hole in the wall to each lunch as we were very hungry by the time we got toward the southern end of the market.
After lunch Kathy wanted to vamoose that place. I think both of us were feeling claustrophobic by then. That’s when Seattle started to suck. The streets were really steep, traffic was horrible with cars and pedestrians, and it was only Wednesday afternoon! We missed a ramp to get over to Lake Union where I figured it would be a bit calmer, but attempting to get around that block was tedious to say the least. We couldn’t turn and all lanes went on the “unmarked” on-ramp to highway 99. And then within a mile or so it ended on the left 
side of I-5 north with the next off-ramp a quarter mile up the road and on the other side. Needless to say, we couldn’t get over for close to a mile, way past the off-ramp we needed. We ended up getting off somewhere near the WU campus, even drove right past their expensive football stadium.
The traffic here was almost as bad as downtown. I’m starting to dislike Seattle… did I already say that? Anyway, we finally got to Lake Union, and to my surprise, there wasn’t anywhere to park. It was getting late and we didn’t want to find out what rush hour looked like; so I mapped a way back to the ferry, bypassing the freeway that we saw was completely stopped on the southbound side as we were going north a bit earlier. We took an interesting drive on older mostly residential streets that eventually got us back downtown and very close to the ferry.
Unfortunately, Google took us to the ferry car loading ramp, but it had just moved about a mile south from where Google thought it was; so we again had to reroute to the new location. We finally made it into the lot and queued up just as a ferry was shoving off. Great, another one-hour wait for the next ferry, but at least we weren’t out in that traffic anymore!!
We finally got back around 5 pm and it felt like we were gone 18 hours. After that day, Kathy said she no longer thought it was a good idea to take the motorhome on the ferry across to Seattle on our way east.
