The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Milo and I are still having problems walking on the other/right-hand side of the sidewalk (aka, “pavement” to you English folks). I am also regularly being asked for directions from strangers when we’re out walking. Other than those two things, I guess we’re settling into Seattle life and life in the loft, which are both very nice with all the sunny weather we’ve had. I keep adding to the Milo on the iconic tour of Seattle photo album and just added ones with Milo and a parking-meter car, another with the Space Needle, Ride The Ducks, the Seattle Streetcar, and a view from Kerry Park on Queen Anne hill. 

Bob and Sylvia, neighbours from our old houseboat days, now have an electric boat. A Duffy 18 foot electric boat, to be specific, which is perfect for Lake Union. Fremont is at the North end of the lake so they boated on down to South Lake Union (our new ‘hood) and picked us up. We had dinner at Dukes (fish taco… mmmm) then cruised around looking at the houseboats. New ones have gone up since we moved off of the lake a few years ago. They’re even more expensive now, but I’d still like to live on one again some day.

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Now that Milo is a Seattleite, I have begun his iconic tour of Seattle, since he already had his iconic tour of London. I will add to it as we meander Seattle. Local experts will notice the Fremont Troll and many other iconic representations of Seattle are missing. There must be some! We’ll eventually add numerous odd photos of Milo so you too can feel like you’re busy walking him around the city. 

On my first day back in Seattle for the summer, I took Milo on an early morning walk to the Olympic Sculpture Park (about a 25 minute walk from our loft). As you can see in the picture, I had Milo do a bit of agility training. After I got him off of the top of the bench, a guy walking past us said “that was a great shot”. I’m not sure if he took a picture of Milo or if he was referring to the picture I took. Either way, it is a nice park that I suspect I’ll be walking Milo to quite often.  

I will be living and working in Seattle over the summer (Lorie & Milo are already there) and I fly out from London on Friday. To celebrate and say goodbye for the summer, I went out with some of my closest friends in London. These are also the friends who have graciously been letting me couch surf for the last couple of weeks, so you could say I owed them too.   

We decided to try L’autre, the Polish & Mexican restaurant, which is amongst a few good restaurants in Shepherds Market. I think we were all pleasantly surprised that both the Polish and the Mexican dishes were good. I think we all wanted to see some weird combination of the two types of food, but we were all relieved that we didn’t have to select something like a chicken & sauerkraut taco.

The band Chicago has a song called “Saturday in the park” and the lyrics start off with “Saturday in the park, I think it was the 4th of July.” I can now say I’ve been there and done that, since a few of us hung out in Hyde Park for the 4th of July this year, which was on a Saturday. There were no fireworks, but watching other people in the park was good entertainment. At various times, we had people around us playing cricket, football (soccer), and frisbee. We didn’t do any of that though, since we were just hanging out and relaxing.

The band Chicago has a song called “Saturday in the park” and the lyrics start off with “Saturday in the park, I think it was the 4th of July.” I can now say I’ve been there and done that, since a few of us hung out in Hyde Park for the 4th of July this year, which was on a Saturday. There were no fireworks, but watching other people in the park was good entertainment. At various times, we had people around us playing cricket, football (soccer), and frisbee. We didn’t do any of that though, since we were just hanging out and relaxing.

On Sunday, we went to Hyde Park for music again, but this time we sat outside the concert walls and listened to some Dave Mathews and Bruce Springsteen, who opened his set with London Calling originally by The Clash. However, Dave Mathews played All Along The Watchtower which was pretty cool too.

I met Megan and Alan there (with Daisy, as you can see) and they brought some Pimm’s and fresh cookies, so the evening was perfect. Lorie is in Seattle right now, so she missed out on the relaxing Sunday in the park with live music.

But about the organized crime… Before I met up with them though, I was sitting on a park bench near the entrance watching the ticket scalpers when one of them came and sat next to me. He only did that because he was frustrated that the cops were around, who were hurting his business (scalping tickets is illegal). He never did tell me where he got the tickets from, so I’m not even sure if they would get you into the concert or not. After a while though, someone sat next to him and bought some tickets, so he was able to still work even with the cops standing nearby. And the guy had a good wad of tickets. He also gave everyone his phone number (or someone’s), which was odd. There was a whole group of these guys with one “ring leader”, so it was all pretty organized. Therefore, I am considering this my brush with organized crime in London…. ticket scalpers in Hyde Park. 

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Saturday morning started with Megan, Alan, Daisy, and me catching a train to southern England to the small town of Seaford. From there we did a 13.3 mile hike heading east on the South Downs Way public footpath, which is a popular hiking route in the area that consists of rolling hills over what is generally called the White Cliffs of Dover, even though we were a few miles southwest from Dover. This was the nicest hiking path I have ever been on, since it was short grass, which was pretty much like walking on a golf green. We also lucked out with the weather and had warm sun all day even though we could see big clouds and thunderheads to the north of us. We ended the hike in Eastbourne with a long walk along the rocky beach before catching the train back to London. If anyone wants to do a nice hike in the summer in England, this is the one I suggest.

Alan has posted his set of pictures from the hike too. He also put together a little map of where we hiked (click on it to get a bigger version):

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We went to the Hard Rock Calling concert at Hyde Park tonight to see The Killers and The Kooks. Seeing a concert in the park here is like going to a fair, complete with a variety of food stalls and drinks. The interesting thing about that is that you can walk around, grazing on different foods (meat pie, hot dog, ice cream, etc) while listening to the music. We of course made our way deep into the crowd during the Killers show, which was fun and very warm. Since all of the beer bottles are plastic, many of them get thrown from one area of the crowd to another. They don’t seem to hurt when you get hit by one, but thankfully I never found out. You just have to watch out for ones that still have beer in them, since a spiralling beer bottle tends to shower everyone below it in beer.