Three: Washignton

            Sometimes I am just lucky and I know it. January was one of those times. I have never been to the Pacific Northwest before and I had no idea if I would ever get there. But I got my chance in January and I grabbed it.
            I flew out to Seattle at the end of the month. When I got on the plane in Boston it was minus 5 Fahrenheit, when I got off the plane in Seattle it was closer to 50 and I was way overdressed. I was going to be busy all week, so I opted against getting a rental car. I knew this meant that if I was going to check Washington off my list of states, I was going to have to find a train within walking distance.
            I was there two days and hadn't seen a train. I did get a photo of a trolley at lunch one day and of the ancient Seattle monorail, but I wasn't any closer to my goal. I was considering counting both the trolley and the monorail as a catch. After spending two days walking around Seattle I decided it was nothing like I imagined. Granted, the imagined version consisted of pieces of a Frasier episode and a Starbucks. I didn't expect the large city laid out on a grid on the side of a hill. On the third day, we took a break from our business and I finally had some time to roam around. I went back to the monorail and decided to take a trip out to the Space Needle.
            The Space Needle is a well preserved version of the past's version of the future. It looks like George Jetson's apartment building. I got off the monorail and walked across the grounds of the former World's Fair. I discovered from reading a brochure that I was just a little bit older than both the World's Fair and the Space Needle -- they both opened in 1962. I wasn't sure at that moment who had held up better.
            I paid my $18 and walked up the ramps to the elevators. It was a cold day and there weren't that many people there, but you can tell by the way the place is laid out the lines must get long when the weather is nicer. From the top, you can see Mt. Rainier, Puget Sound and Lake Washington. Mt. Rainier looks like a solid lump of power just waiting to erupt. I am not sure I would want to live that close to a volcano. From Seattle it is more than 50 miles away, but I didn't get a feel for anything but its destructive power the whole time I was there. I am not sure if it was because I watched a lenticular cloud form by it, or just because it dominates the southern sky.

Lenticular Cloud

            The other thing that you can see from the top of the Space Needle is one of the city's railroad yards. I still had my 500 mm lens on my camera and I aimed it at a locomotive working the yard and I had another state. I captured Louis Dreyfus Corp. GP-9 2011, which had started life as  a Northern Pacific unit back in the day. I felt pretty good being able to cross another state off my list, but I wanted to get something a little more intimate, so after I got out of the Space Needle, I walked a few blocks down to Alaskan Way.
            I ate lunch in Anthony's Pier 66 and then hung around the BNSF line that runs along the waterfront in Seattle. I didn't have to wait long before BNSF Dash 9, 964 came into view pulling an intermodal. The light wasn't great, the composition wasn't what I was hoping for, but there I was with a camera in my hand and I wasn't going to waste the opportunity.

            I was lucky to be in Seattle. I was lucky to be standing around watching trains.