Tag: Seattle

Digital Nomad: The Seattle Years

By Mike Huber

I wasn’t thrilled the first few months in Seattle after having moved from Victoria.  The timing of my move didn’t help since it was at the end of summer when the sun almost totally gives way to the gloomy gray clouds.  It wasn’t so much that it rained there but you absolutely could feel less energy around you due to a serious lack of vitamin D in everyone’s system. Nonetheless, I was here and had signed a one-year lease in a high rise in the Seattle neighborhood of Belltown, so I had to make the best of it.

It didn’t take too long to feel closed in living in the city.  Seattle isn’t a big city but what was missing is the nature that had engulfed and spoken to me over the past year.  My “office,” which I went in maybe once every few weeks to meet the team for coffee or happy hour, was in Bellevue.  I am usually not one to badmouth areas, but instead I like to look at the positive side and its attributes. In Bellevue I couldn’t find any.  It was a suburban plastic city with nothing but cookie cutter restaurants and bars.  It was like the Truman show, but with a “keep up with the Jones” mentality.  Everyone had expensive cars and would even move parking spaces to flaunt the material items they had become slaves to.  When asking them what they did on the weekend it usually entailed going to Costco and dinner at a Chili’s or Cheesecake Factory to wrap up a day at the mall.

Thankfully, I rode my Ducati Monster M1100 out from Maine.  This became the best way to leave the beaten path and explore the state of Washington, and boy did I explore it.  It was a quick learning curve to find incredible roads and remote camping areas that most people not only didn’t dare to explore (there were no Chili’s out on the Olympic Peninsula).  This was fine with me.

Once again, every weekend was like a vacation for me as I explored Washington.  When I went into the office my peers would gather to hear about where I went over the weekend and what I had experienced.  There were numerous challenging hikes, remote beach camping on the Olympic Peninsula, motorcycle rides through the Cascades, numerous volcanos, and countless treasures I discovered by talking to fellow hikers and riders.  I was starting to love Washington.  The diversity inspired me to explore the region and it was a rare weekend when I stayed in Seattle.

It didn’t take long before I got over the fear of city life, built a circle of great friends, and became fully acclimated to living in Belltown.  The weekends involved traveling through the state or up to Vancouver, BC and weekdays I spent in coffee shops and bars with my new friends. Life became pretty routine (which was odd for me), but it was enjoyable.

One of the cooler things I loved about Seattle is how dog friendly of a city it is.  For years they had a dog that rode the city bus with a bus pass to the local dog park.  Also, dogs are not only allowed in most bars but actually sit at the bar and the bartender provides a water dish and treats for them.  I have been in bars where at times there are more dogs than people.  This just added to my feelings for this city.

Although after almost three years living in the Seattle area and exploring most of its secrets, there were a few moments that told me it was time to return to my nomadic lifestyle.  One was during a Seattle Seahawks playoff game.  It was on TV and I went out on my tiny balcony to get some air, I looked around at all the high-rise apartments next to me and EVERY television was on the same channel watching the same thing. It was a scene out of George Orwell’s 1984.  It freaked me out and that was one of the seeds nudging me to move on.  The other was the gray skies. I was beginning to become depressed from lack of vitamin D and no matter how many supplements I took I could feel I was sinking into a depressive abyss. My parents, always ones to come up with creative solutions (that’s where I get it from) sent me a mood light for Christmas. It didn’t help.

That one final Seattle winter only provided the city with 20 hours of sun from mid-October until May.  I decided to take action.  I threw the mood light in the trash and devised a plan to leave Seattle and spend a month in Montana.  Little did I know that this decision would morph into a series of life changing events.

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Digital Nomad: Returning to the USA

By Mike Huber

I had been living and working on the beautiful rain forest island town of Victoria, British Columbia, but I had noticed the past couple of times returning from my work trips to Seattle that the Canadian Immigration people started to take notice of me and were more than aware that the stories I was feeding them weren’t true (they could see my entry/exit dates and they did NOT track with what I was telling them).   During one of the last times I crossed the border I was pulled aside.  They ran my Massachusetts driver’s license and the agent quickly stated “You’re a long way from home, son.”  To which I provided my normal reply by pointing at my backpack:  No, sir. My home is right there.  He didn’t find it funny (they never do).  He returned my IDs and had me move through Customs without further issue.

It was definitely time to return to the United States.  It didn’t take too long over the next week to pack up, deflate the leaky air mattress I had been sleeping on for 8 months, and place the Good Will furniture on the corner (the furniture and I shared the same situation; we were both looking for our next home). Loading everything into the car was the final step before getting on the Tsawwassen Ferry, which would bring me to Vancouver.  It was a short and uneventful 3-hour drive to my new residence in Seattle, Washington.

Victoria was one of the very few places that made me cry when I left.  I had a beautiful eight months living there and felt so fortunate that I was not only able to experience this island and the great people who live there, but that I was able to stay for so long.  It is one of the few places I have lived that I proudly called my home.

I was back in the United States after a year and a half.  It was time to get an actual apartment and furniture that wasn’t from Good Will.  Belltown in Seattle seemed to be a no brainer as far as a location.  There were tons of bars and restaurants, it was next to the Olympic Sculpture Park, and the Victoria Clipper was right there (if I felt the urge to jump back to Victoria on the high-speed catamaran).  Maybe the coolest part of Belltown was that my apartment was in the shadow of the Space Needle, which is one of my favorite buildings.

The one big lesson I learned in my vagabond, digital nomad travels is it is much easier to get back on the wheel than it is to exit it. Getting an apartment and having my furniture sent from Boston was easy.  Leaving the wheel required a ton of planning and preparation.  It took months to downsize, find a storage for my vehicles, rent my condo, etc.  The tasks seemed to never end when I prepared to leave the wheel, and as I completed each task I found myself constantly questioning my decision as I counted down to Day 0.

I was now a Seattle resident.  Over the past 18 months I left from the start of I-90 near Fenway Park to the end of the same road at Safeco Field.  It would have only been a three-thousand-mile trip on I-90, but I took the longest route possible by meandering through five countries.  I was anxious to meet new friends and see how being back on the wheel would treat me, and more importantly, how I would adjust to this old lifestyle I had left 18 months ago.

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Seattle’s Museum of Flight

Susie and I were up in Seattle earlier in the year for a wedding and while we were there, we visited the Museum of Flight.  It’s one of the world’s great museums, and the $25 admission fee was money well spent.  We were lucky on our visit: It was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and the museum had a special exhibit focused on that.  It was awesome.

Neil Armstrong’s actual Apollo 11 capsule. The actual capsule. It was like touching history.
One of the Saturn rocket engines used on the Apollo mission.
My photo of a photo: Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. I came close to meeting him once at Nieuport 17, a restaurant in Tustin, California, but he wasn’t there the night we were.
An Omega Speedmaster watch worn on the moon.  One of these original moon watches sold for $1.6 million just a few years ago.  There’s an interesting story on this Omega watch (and on a competitor watch, the Bulova). My apologies for the flaky photo; this was the best I could in the dim lighting.

The Apollo special exhibit was only a fraction of what the Museum of Flight displayed.  The main hall had all kinds of aircraft.

A view of the Museum of Flight’s main hall. That’s an SR-71 at the center of the photo. It’s a spy aircraft developed in the 1960s that flew entire missions over Russia and China, all at supersonic speeds.
An early commercial passenger aircraft.
An F4 Phantom. I was an engineer on the F-16, the air combat fighter that replaced the F4.  When I was in the Army, we provided air defense for an airbase in Korea with an F4 wing, and watching these aircraft take off with their afterburners on was fun.
A World War II airplane on display in the Museum of Flight’s Personal Courage Wing. The Personal Courage Wing, a separate part of the Museum, has 28 aircraft from World War I and World War II.

We spent nearly a full day at the Museum of Flight, and we could have spent more time there.   We visited the Apollo display, the Main Hall, the Personal Courage Wing, and the Red Barn (the original Boeing airplane factory).   As were left the airport, we saw an enclosed pedestrian walkway over the road, and it led to an area with several aircraft parked on the other side of the road.   We could have spent another day there.  We’ll save that for our next visit to Seattle.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight is a 20-minute ride out of downtown Seattle, and it’s a great way to spend a day.

Seattle’s Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum

I was up in Seattle about a month ago, and while we were there, we visited the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum.  It’s just below the Seattle Space Needle.   I enjoyed it, and if you are in the area and you want to experience something new, this is a place you might consider visiting.  I had seen exotic blown glass in Venice (Italy, not California) a few years ago and I guess I was expecting to see more of the same, but trust me on this, the Chihuly Museum is unique.  It features the blown glass artistry of Daly Chihuly, and it’s unlike anything I’d ever seen.  The shapes, the colors, the size of the sculptures…all of it was amazing.  Take a peek…

The Chihuly blown glass sculptures are huge, and it you look carefully at the photos, you can see people in the background and that will give you a sense of scale.  The Nikon’s low light level capabilities came through for me here; these photos accurately portray what we saw in the Museum’s darkened interior.

There sure are a lot of interesting things to see here in the US, and I’m constantly amazed at how many of them I had never heard of before.  The Chihuly Museum was in that category.   There are other exciting destinations out there, and when Gresh and I find them, you’ll read about it here.  Gresh is headed out to the Yamaha Endurofest in a couple of weeks (watch for that), and I’m headed overseas again.  More good stuff coming up, folks!