We were just in Washington state.  We haven’t been in probably a decade.  It made me start to realize that irritating trait older people have… ‘I remember when’, ‘You’re too young too remember’, etc.  Yes, it’s true we are young to be retired, but here we are… we never won the lottery, we never ‘made it big’… but we saved hard, and lived a different lifestyle.  We seldom wrote checks to have others do for us what we could do ourselves.  And we are younger than most of our retired friends.. the rest just aren’t retired yet.  Why we have to endure their…. ‘just wait you’ll get there’, is beyond me.  I hope never to do that to others in the future.

But here we were in WA state, bemoaning how it has changed from the last time we were here.  I suspect that as time has passed, and time goes forward, it will forever be true.  You can’t take it back as you plow down nature, replacing it with buildings and high-rises holding the likes of Starbucks and Hard Rock Cafe’s.  As each of us see something for the first time, it is forever not the same again.

The traffic alone in the Seattle area was enough to keep me from ever coming back.  It was worse than the worse day in California traffic, and that’s notoriously bad.  People from the area swear never to go to Seattle proper just because of the traffic.

We remember going through Pike Place Market ever so fondly in the past, so we made a special trip to walk it’s halls yet again.  We felt like salmon swimming upstream in a sea of tourists.  It was a complete zoo.