The Big Move Home: Day 1

Day 1 Route: Seattle, WA to Port Angeles, WA

Pictures: The Big Move Home: Day 1

Where are we now? If you want to see where we are at any time on the trip, register with Google Latitude and add brettsam as a friend.

Day 1 By The Numbers

	Day 1	Total
Miles Driven	78.4	78.4
Time in Car	2:29	2:29
New State License Plates Seen	5	5
Diapers Changed	5	5

For such a short day of driving (under 2 hours in the car), it sure was exhausing. We woke up pretty early on Saturday and started packing up our camp-inspired furnitures. It may sound adventurous to live with folding chairs and air mattresses for a week, but the one word I can use to describe it is 'uncomfortable'. Let's just say that our air mattress would severly fail the bowling-ball/wine-glass test. I think I speak for Jess when I say that we were very glad to know we'd be sleeping in a real bed on Saturday night.

On top of the packing, we still had a bit of cleaning left to finish. The night before I decided that jamming the garbage disposal would be fun, so that made cleaning out the refrigerator a little harder than anticipated. After that, the vacuum we were borrowing from our apartment manager decided to die. We took that as a sign and decided to pay for a few hours of cleaning out of our deposit.

We knew the sheer amount of energy we'd need to break out from Seattle's gravitational pull would hurt our chances for making it very far on the first day, so we planned the day's route pretty conservatively. We wanted to get out of our apartment around noon, return our cable modem (yeah, we kept our internet connection alive until the last possible second), and have a Paseo picnic at Kerry Park. Surprisingly, everything on the schedule went off without a hitch. Ritchie and Ailey even met up with us at the park for lunch.

After lunch, it was time to head for the ferry. We decided to take the Seattle-Bainbridge ferry to get some nice 'Leaving Seattle' pictures, and it made the journey feel a little more dramatic than the Edmonds-Kingston ferry would have. Nothing against Edmonds, but I think sailing away from downtown Seattle is a slightly better photo-op.

After that, nothing but 75 miles of driving around the peninsula until we got to Port Angeles. Throughout these blog posts, you'll have to assume that when I say we drove straight from one place to another, it involved at least one stop every 40 miles or so. Our 75 mile drive today had 2 stops: one for food (Finley) and one for the bathroom (me). Stopping twice in an hour and a half is pretty good for us.

When we got to Port Angeles, we decided to check in and then head into town for a quick dinner. Port Angeles seemed pretty quiet, and reminded me a lot of the other port towns we've seen in the Pacific Nortwest. There was a huge cruise ship docked downtown, which did seem a bit surreal, but there wasn't much else going on. We did notice a ton of Twilight references, which makes me a little nervous for our drive through Forks and La Push (coming tomorrow!). Our favorite Twilight-related thing was a quote on a restaurant's brochure said something like "Edward and Bella had there (sic) first date in Port Angeles. Try our Mushroom Ravioli and a Coke: the same meal Bella had!" The place had over an hour wait, so they must be doing something right. We went elsewhere.

After an uneventful dinner, we decided we were done for the day and came back to the hotel to watch Just Like Heaven (awesome) on TV and fall asleep. All in all, a pretty solid start to the trip.

Tomorrow: Heading to Long Beach, WA