The Adventure at Alki Beach

Last weekend, Tacy came to visit us in Seattle. We took her to all our favorite Seattle spots: Kerry Park, Ballard, Senor Moose (our favorite Seattle restaurant) and Pike Place Market.  On Saturday though, we took quite a little adventure for our first time, and Tacy's of course, to Alki Beach in West Seattle.

To get to Alki Beach, you can drive, take a bus, or take a ferry and walk. It was a nice day outside and we were close to the ferries, so we decided to take the 10 minute water taxi over there. Once the ferry/taxi drops you off, it's about a mile walk to the actual beach.

After the ferry ride, I decided to use the restroom before the long walk. The bathroom on the landing spot was so disgusting, but against my better judgement, I decided to use it. I also decided to take off my pullover and wear just my tank top for the walk, and in the process, dropped my BRAND NEW pullover on the bathroom floor. It was covered in... well, I don't know what and I don't really want to know.

The adventure was not off to a great start.  But the view of the city was nice!

So we started walking, my poor little pullover balled up and tucked in my purse, and when we finally reached the beach, I claimed I wanted to walk on the sand. Big. Mistake. The sand was so hot, people playing sand volleyball were wearing socks. So we headed for the water, but then found rocks and broken shells which hurt equally as bad, AND the water was freezing. So, it was an all around terrible idea.

Back to the road we went and naturally, we decided to get ice cream because what goes together better than ice cream and the beach? This is where we discovered that I have amazingly fast reflexes when it comes to food.

Scene: Ice cream scooper hands me cone with chocolate peanut butter ice cream on top. It looked kinda like this:

I took one lick and because the scoops were so big and the cone was so small, the scoops fell from the cone. I reacted faster than I ever have and managed to catch the entire scoop(s) with my bare hand before it/they hit the floor. Not a drop of ice cream was lost. I don't mess around when it comes to sweets, y'all.

After the long walk and the terrible sand experience, we decided to take the bus ride back to downtown Seattle. So we waited for the bus while we ate our ice cream and planned out the rest of our evening. The bus arrived pretty quickly and started through West Seattle, towards downtown.  Chuck asked the bus driver if the bus would take us to downtown Seattle, just to be 100% sure we were on the right bus, and the bus driver said "Yeah I'll get you there."

Thirty minutes later we were approaching downtown Seattle when the bus took a strange turn and headed South and East, completely the opposite direction of the Seattle skyline. Cue confusion/anger/laughter/more confusion. After another look at the map and bus route, we realized this bus was going NOWHERE NEAR DOWNTOWN. So as soon as we could, we got off the bus and stood at a bus stop literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, there was a field in front of and behind us.

To make a long story shorter, we caught a bus there that took us almost to our apartment's front door and all was well. But wow. What a disaster.

So basically our beach trip turned into a dirtied brand new shirt (which did come perfectly clean after one wash, just in case anyone was wondering), a painful experience for our feet, a test of my reflexes when ice cream is at stake, and an accidental bus tour of parts of Seattle I don't care to visit again.

Oh well. It makes for a good story, I guess. And we got to see this flower covered house, so it was all worth it.