This last Thursday, I checked yet another item off of my Summer Bucket List and did something I've wanted to do for a long time: ride the Sounder train.  I remember when I was in my first quarter enrolled in Green River Community College, taking classes at the Kent campus, Mom would drive me down there, but we would often get stopped before the railroad tracks as the Sounder rolled by.  I always loved looking in through the windows at the people inside, some at tables where they typed on their laptops, others reading the morning paper.  I always thought how neat it would be to take the train every morning to work or to school and be among one of those commuters.  I've wanted to go for a ride for awhile, but I never could since the Sounder doesn't operate on the weekends - only on the weekdays when I was too busy with school and Mom was too busy with work.



It was about a week since we had our Portland trip and things were going a bit slow again, us falling into the same routines.  And then it donned on me: all of our weekdays are free now... that meant that we could take the Sounder!  I mentioned it to Mom, who perked up and said, "Oh... Oh yeah!"  So we looked into times (the latest we could depart without it being too late in the day was 8:30 AM... eeks!) and made our plans for taking the train and spending a day in Seattle.  The day finally came and we got up bright and early to drive to the Kent train station.  After leaving the car parked at a nearby lot, we walked over, bought our tickets, and waited at the platform.  It was so exciting, finally being among these people to wait for the train!  Soon, we finally saw the familiar train stop in front of us, and as we stepped on, me and Mom walked straight up the stairs to the upper level and managed to get some lovely seats by the window so that we could watch Kent roll away as the train took off.  At first, it was really relaxing: sitting in our seats, gazing out the window, watching the landscapes roll by, on our way to our destination.  After a few minutes, though, I actually started to feel uneasy.  I think it was a combination of the train ride getting a little bumpier along with my own fear I have of machines.  I'm not so afraid of cars or buses because they're closer to the ground and they're not quite so massive.  But for some reason with other machines like amusement park rides - and now, I have discovered, trains - I get nervous about them breaking down.  Machines can break down: screws can come undone, gears can rust or break or whatever.  I just had this panicky fear then of something happening with the train, like some gear breaking and the train not being able to stop or just plain falling apart, or in the middle of one of those bumps, the train coming off the tracks and crashing on the side of the road.  And we were going pretty fast, too, which didn't help very much.  I don't know, maybe I would do better with a train ride in the countryside on a nice flat, straight path - no slopes or twists or bumps.

Anyway, it actually didn't take very long at all to get to Seattle, which really surprised me!  We got off the train and before you knew it, we were in the city.  Mom needed to get her tea, of course, so we walked through the morning bustle of people on their way to work and cars driving past, and we ended up going into this really cute coffee shop called Zeitgeist!  After ordering our drinks and snacks, I got us two seats by a counter facing the front windows.  While I waited, I pulled out the book I was currently reading from my bag: The Ocean At the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, and as I read, I thought to myself how well I felt I fit into this scenery and I thought of how great it would be if I moved to the city and could walk to the coffee shop every morning before work to have some breakfast and get my fill on a good book.

I ordered this lovely mug of hot chocolate along with a breakfast sandwich, and it was so good.  The breakfast sandwich was the perfect thing to eat first thing in the morning and filled me up so much.  And it truly was like eating scrambled eggs in a sandwich!  Mm!  And the hot chocolate was amazing.  I kept saying this to Mom, that it tasted like liquid Tiramisu!  It had the exact same flavor that Tiramisu has and it was just a really good hot chocolate, which I was really happy with because it's surprisingly hard to find a place that makes good hot chocolate, not just some generic recipe.

After finishing up at the coffee place, Mom and I spent the rest of the day walking the streets, admiring the buildings and the dogs and everything else.  We made our way to Pike Place Market, stopping into this really neat bookstore that somehow we never noticed before during the hundreds of times we've been at Pike Place!  It wasn't very big: it had two rooms and then a staircase that went up to the upper level, where we saw this cute, tucked away window seat:


So naturally, I had to sit there myself:



After leaving the bookstore, we wandered through Pike Place Market and the other shops down that street, then we walked up to the street with other stores like Forever21 and H&M and went into those places to browse.  At this point, though, I was getting a bit grumpy, tired after a long day, so we made our way back to the train station and waited for the 3:12 train to take us back home.  So, that was our day taking the Sounder to Seattle!  It was pretty fun and another adventure for us to try out, and there were some other things I didn't go into detail about that happened that day, like seeing this cute guy singing and playing on his guitar, and having another one of my wonderful talks with Mom.  So, I guess I like the idea of a train ride more than the real experience, but I still love Seattle every time I go there and I really believe that I belong there.  One day..!

x Danielle