In late July of 2007, Tony and I took what was dubbed The West Side Trip. We've travelled from Pullman to Seattle and Vancouver numerous times, but our West Side Trip was far and away the most fun we have had together on the better side of Washington.
After spending some nights in Portland -- with Mir and Eric, Adam, Rach and Scott, and Drea, and lots of booze, we wandering up the state to Seattle. We had planned to stay at Tony's mom's house, like we do every time we're in Seattle, but instead we ended up at Zach and Jen's. Our plans quickly turned into their plans: we barbequed, drank a lot of beer, and made plans to go to Seafair. The Blue Angels were in town and, because Zach and Jen live a stone's throw away from Lake Washington, we had an amazing backyard view of the synchonized flyers. We stood out on their newly finished deck with Tyler, who was in town as well and took some time to hang out, drank beer, and followed as the planes stormed over our heads in a flash. It looked like an overly intense, skyward tennis match.
On the first day Tyler came over, we wandered down to the beach, cameras and Death Juice in tow. (I don't want to spend too much time describing Death Juice, but suffice to say it involved lemon flavored vodka and juice and 7-Up maybe, and probably some other shit, but it's like 80% vodka. And it goes down much too smooth. It was enough that a third of the contents of a metal water bottle got me so drunk I had to take a nap in the middle of the day. Not before cutting my knee open on a rock and throwing up enchiladas. [I sure hope my dad is reading this right now.]) We sauntered over to the water, just a few blocks away, and watched this little red bi-plane doing supremely impressive stunts. He would climb straight up, flip around, and just fall toward the ground, twisting and appearing out of control, until he was thisclose to the water and would pull back hard to fly along the lake's surface.
The pilot would also create perfect corkscrews, horizontal through the sky, leaving behind his plane a swirly contrail that would slowly dissipate into the beautiful July sky. It was quite the spectacle, undoubtedly, but the event's fun was compounded by the fact that I love summer more than any season and we were right in the thick of it, that I was with Tony (who I love dearly) and Tyler (who is one of my BFFs) and Death Juice (before he turned against me, the wiling bastard), and that we were in Seattle, one of the most spectacular cities in the USA.
