Arrival
Well, I’m in Seattle!
My clever ploy to take an umbrella evidently worked, because it was quite lovely all day yesterday, and it’s only cloudy today–not so bad–with a downpour only during the night. I even left some Seattle weather behind at Logan Airport, where there was a driving rain as my airplane took off, three hours behind schedule.
Despite the delay, the flight itself was unremarkable–which means excellent. However, since I arrived so late, I went to bed Friday night (Saturday morning, that is) at the equivalent of 6AM, east coast time. That’s why I took the day off yesterday to chill out and visit and recover.
Speaking of recovery, about twenty-four hours before my departure I sensed I was coming down with a nasty cold. You know how it is–one moment you’re fine, going about your business, and the next moment you know you’re not only about to get sick, you actually already are sick. So, desperate to avoid becoming really sick on vacation, I tried taking some of those zinc lozenges I’d heard so much about.
I hereby report, much to my delight, that they seem to be working. Even though I know I can’t scientifically prove it by this sample of a single cold, so far the symptoms have been so much less severe than usual that I’m willing to do my bit to advertise the zinc treatment to those few of you who might have previously been aware of it. The worst that seems to happen is that you are forced to suck on a pretty decent-tasting zinc-laced hard candy every couple of hours. Sad, isn’t it?
Defeating jet lag is easy: Stay up all night packing for your trip, don’t sleep on the flight, and by the time you get to your destination, your internal clock os so screwed up it’ll grab on to the local diurnal cycle quite readily.
Zinc works, I agree! I used the nasal swabs- no bad taste as with some oral methods (though apparently not your candy). Colds that used to last days became minor inconveniences after only a day.
How long will you be in Seattle? I have some suggestions.
The city is very nice but there are other nice cities. The thing that makes Seattle special is the mountains and forests that surround it. Try to take a day or so to visit 1 of 3 places; 1. the Olympic National Forest (either Hurricane Ridge or La Push or the Hoh Forest) or 2. the Mt. Rainier National Park (usually the spot to see is “Paradise”, on the other side of the mountain, hours and hours away by car, is an interesting place called “Sunrise”.
Otherwise 3. go north and then drive route 20 east over the Cascades (check to see if route 20 is open the day you go, there is a phone number for it). Rt 20 is closed every winter and opens usually sometime around the end of May, so check.
Bring your camera.
When we traveled to Hong Kong and other points Far East years ago, they advised us to just stay up for the rest of the new day once we got there, which we did, and which more or less worked, although I almost fell off the harbor-cruise boat that evening when I fell asleep standing up. By next day, though, we had overcome our jet lag and were back up to speed.