I turn 46 today. When I woke up in bed, Shobhit leaned over and put his arm over me, saying "Happy Birthday" into my ear. He does this pretty much every year. It's sweet.
But, I'm going to tell you about yesterday now. That officially started Birth Week 2022. The
full photo set for the day only amounted to 21 shots, which suits me just fine actually; too often my ten days of "Birth Week" photo albums are overwhelmed with photos I can't keep up with captioning. I don't even know if I'll be able to this year either, except to say that trains aren't quite as photogenic as, say, state parks, which was my theme last year. (
Last year amounted to 14 separate photo albums at as many parks, averaging 36 shots per album. Which actually isn't that bad on a per-album basis; I won't be seeing that many trains though.)
Anyway. Tracy and I rode the Sounder Commuter Train from King Street Station to Tacoma Dome Station, and instead of rushing back on the last northbound train, we just had dinner down there and hung out for a little while before catching a Sound Transit express bus back, which hardly took much longer, mostly because at Tacoma Dome Station the bus had already gone through all its other Tacoma stops and our next stop wasn't until downtown Seattle. The train actually has several stops in between, including
Tukwila, Kent, Auburn, Sumner and Puyallup.
When we got to Puyallup Station, I told Tracy, "You're home!" because that's where she was born and raised, and where her parents still live. She said, "This is considered 'The Valley.' I'm from 'The Hill.'" I pointed to a hill in the distance and said, "That hill?" She said yes.
I kept thinking I had ridden the Sounder Commuter Train twice before, but I think I invented the second ride in my head because of the times I happened to notice Sounder Stations near places I went via other modes of transportation: the year I went to Kent to see a Star Wars movie with Gabriel, at a shopping center right by Kent Station; the year I took the bus to the Washington State Fair and saw how close Puyallup Station was. Based on my photo records, however, the only other time I actually
rode the Sounder train was with Susan and Barbara, which had also been for my Birth Week—
in 2008. That was fully ten years before I started choosing themes for my Birth Week; it was just a random idea we had then.
Based on photo captions of the time, the schedule was exactly the same, and we went to exactly the same destination: Tacoma. In 2008, we rode the very same train right back to Seattle, which actually had been my initial plan this year with Tracy, until she asked if there were any buses we could take back so we could hang out for a bit in Tacoma. The Sounder Train actually goes further south, on to South Tacoma and Lakewood, but you have to transfer to another train to do it.
Tracy decided to take an Uber to King Street Station, whereas I took Light Rail—technically the first train I took for my Birth Week, then, rather than the Sounder. But, I have a dedicated Light Rail excursion planned with Alexia next Friday. I take Light Rail a lot anyway, of course, and in this case I rode from Capitol Hill Station to International District Station, which did not take long at all.
Getting to the Sounder platform is easy . . . if you know how to do it. If you don't, it's very confusing. It's also very different from what it had been in 2008, as I recall. I could be remembering wrong (which happens a lot—to everyone, in my defense; not just me!—but I don't think there was this overpass you had to go up to in 2008, to get down to the center platform the Sounder Train uses, without ever needing to use the King Street Station terminal used by Amtrak. The
Weller Street pedestrian bridge is either accessible via stairs from the parking lot just south of the Amtrak station, or directly across the comparatively elevated "Weller Street Walk" on the other side (the bridge is level with 4th Avenue but at a much higher level than the ground floor of the Amtrak terminal). I accessed it via the Weller Street Walk, after coming up from the tunnel International District Station across the street after getting off Light Rail. When the
East Link Extension of Light Rail opens with ten new stations stretching over to Redmond in 2023, this will also be where trains transfer for going in that direction.
I actually texted three different maps to Tracy earlier in the morning to give her some visual context as to where to go when she got to the station, but she clearly didn't pay particularly close attention. To be fair, it's still confusing if you haven't been there already, and also if you are running late—which she was. She texted me at, like, 3:20,
Soooo I don't want to stress you out but my uber driver just picked me up. In the end, had she known exactly where to go, we actually would have truly just barely made it on the 3:35 train as planned. As it was, at 3:35 she texted me,
I think I'm in the terminal. Which was not where she needed to be.
It turned out she also does not already have an Orca card and needed to buy a ticket. Well, now we had twenty minutes until the next train left at 3:55 anyway. We chatted for a minute where I found her sitting on a wooden bench inside the Amtrak terminal, she told me about how she had been "stress vomiting" and hoped there wouldn't be any issue on the train (there wasn't—although I told her I'd had to take some Pepto Bismol tablets before leaving and joked about a train ride on which she was vomiting and I was shitting everywhere), and then I led her over to the Weller Street Bridge from which we could get to the proper train platform. It took her a while even to figure out how to get a ticket; she wound up buying a day pass that later proved unnecessary because it was only for the train, but the northbound bus driver just let her on anyway. I had only just finally found an actual ticket kiosk on the platform when she was finally almost done purchasing by phone and getting a QR reader that the scanner wouldn't even scan. No one checked our fares anyway.
We truly barely had time to get that shot I wanted in front of the train before we needed to board, even in time to leave at 3:55. And I did figure out that, had we really wanted, we still could have barely made it on the last northbound train to come back, but we stuck with the plan of staying in Tacoma for a bit, and we immediately went into a largely empty Freighthouse Square—which Barbara and I used to deliver
Seattle Gay Standard papers to, in 2001—to have dinner at a place called
Wendy's Vietnamese Restaurant in the middle of what is basically a long, narrow food court.
I suppose I could have asked some people in the know what there might have been of interest nearby for us to check out. But, when we were done with dinner, we walked the mall a bit, seeing nearly every shop closed even though many of them lied and said they were open until 7:00. Then we took a stroll northward along D Street, under the Highway 509 bridge (officially called the
East 21st Street Bridge, apparently; this was my first time ever going under it rather than over), and then a while along what I now know to be called the
Thea Foss Waterway. After passing several cars and camper trailers clearly populated by homeless people, we finally found a spot with closer access to the boat marina water and I got a nice photo of the view of downtown Tacoma on the other side of it. I'm saving that for a later DLU; the Tacoma skyline shot below was actually taken from the Sounder Train as we pulled into Tacoma Station.
We chatted for a while, overlooking the boats and the water, then moseyed back again. The timing worked out perfectly, as once we found the bay for the northbound #594 Sound Transit bus back to Seattle, the next bus was set to arrive in two minutes. We got on that bus and rode home mostly in silence, which was just as well given the noise of freeway travel on a bus. Tracy snoozed much of the way and I read my library book. When I reached my stop at 9th and Howell, I thanked Tracy for spending the evening with me and de-boarded. I caught the #11 a few minutes later and was home shortly after. Shobhit had a late shift and at his request I made him a grilled cheese sandwich. I also made us both hot toddies.
Ivan was home when I got there, and he almost immediately said, "Guess what I did today, Matthew!" I hadn't even realized he had been gone not just all day, but since so early—apparently he got on a tour bus downtown (Seattle) and took a bus tour to Mt. Rainier, which he had never been to. He texted me several beautiful, very snowy photos; I have been many times but the last time I was there when there was still a lot of snow was when I was little, and the last time I went at all was when Danielle and I drove Nikki out there during her visit in 2006. Shobhit has still never been, so he and I should really go one of these days.
I had been reading some more, but once Shobhit got home and turned the TV on, I went to bed kind of early as I was tired.
[posted 8:21 pm]
