Days 19 and 20 - Seattle and London


The Plan (the whole Plan)
oh, who care, frankly?

There's something deeply unsatisfactory about the end of the holiday.

So let's keep it simple. The plan was that, since David had to stay in Seattle for a bit, he had booked another hire car for the duration.  Rupert had to leave early, but Patrick and Mark had the best part of the day to kill.  So we dropped Rupert off at the airport, with a view to dropping Fred off as well and picking up David's new hire car.  But David had left his driving licence at the hotel.  So we returned to the hotel, picked upteh licence and the luggage, went back to the airport, checked Mark and Patrick's bags well in advance of time, David went off to another part of the airport to drop Fred off, got a bus back to the check-in desk, met Mark and Patrick, all three got the courtesy bus to the second car hire company who had David's car ....

....okay, forget the bit about keeping it simple.

Anyway, we dropped Rupert off.  He discovered that, following the visit to Minnesota, his five year old daughter had fallen utterly in love with Mark.  He has placed an order for a shotgun.

And we went back to Pike's pub in Seattle for lunch.  Then we left.  Then we were hauled back in by irate staff.  It seemed that Mark's attempts to pay the bill had overlooked the important distinction between US and Canadian dollars, and why you don't pay in a combination of the two.

So we went for a walk in the woods.  Well, we did so eventually, as the first park was closed.  And so back to the plane, for two of us to return to Britain and David to be left on his jack.

In spite of having checked in so early, Mark and Patrick found that they had been allocated crap seats next to each other.  But a last-minute reorganisation, caused by another bunch of people wanting to sit next to each other, suddenly got them both aisle seats, and a change of company to talk to during a 9-hour flight.

Or, as Mark, put it, "Har har! I get two gorgeous girls from Seattle, and you get the annual convention of the Woodcraft Folk."

Or, as Patrick put it, "Fuck off, you bastard."

Back to London.  Sleep.  The End.