Laney and I could not hang out any longer than about two hours for our Happy Hour at Marination Ma Kai in West Seattle last night. Unlike Friday, when there are later times for water taxis across Elliott Bay for several more hours, Monday through Thursday, the last boat back to Downtown Seattle is at 7:05. And I only caught the 4:45 boat from Downtown, getting to the restaurant just after 5:00.

On the other hand, we really felt like it worked better for us to have shifted from last Friday. Yesterday was only Wednesday, and while we had no problem finding a decent table, had it been any busier than it was, we might have faced a challenge there. Imagine how much busier it must be on Fridays.

I do really like this place and will happily go back, but I do have one complaint about it. They have a food counter just inside the front entrance but a separate bar window for drinks facing the back patio. You cannot order your food and drinks at the same time, forcing multiple transactions. I find that to be a kind of pointless pain in the ass. Plus, we both wound up getting a second drink, so I had to run my credit card three separate times just for one visit to this place. That's dumb.

You can hardly beat the view, though. Well, I guess you can beat the view we had last night, which was slightly marred by a moderate amount of wildfire smoke. All the other times we've met in West Seattle had clearer air than this.

I didn't even think about it until we said goodbye, but whether Laney and I see each other again before she leaves town to return to her travels remains very much up in the air. This may turn out to be our last in-person visit until the spring. Laney had been thinking about finding a place to rent through the winter and not leaving after all, but she hasn't found a good spot, which is kind of forcing her hand. She said she feels like she might as well do more of this traveling while it's still easier for her to do it, anyway.

So, we'll see. If she's still around the first weekend of October, I may have her over for a movie watch. I'm out of town the previous weekend, and this coming weekend she's unavailable.

This likely still won't be the last time I use a passenger ferry this year. I might even use them two more times, if I can get Danielle to come joyride the Kitsap Fast Ferry to Kingston one weekend probably while Shobhit's in India next month, and then if at some point I go to Claudia's in Port Orchard again, this time to stay the night. I've got a lot of ideas going through my head for things to do over the next three months or so.

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— पांच हजार दो सौ सत्तर आठ —

I keep a working log of my cumulative "travel days" each year—"travel day" being defined, usually, as overnight stays away from home anywhere excluding my parents' house in Olympia. I'll include a day trip occasionally, if it's an all-day affair and takes me clearly out of town: my day drive to Leavenworth for the Family Vacation in 2020, or my day train ride on Amtrak to Portland and back during my Birth Week this year.

Anyway, by the time I get back from Leavenworth later this month, I'll have had 26 travel days in 2022. That'll be a record since 2016, that year being the last one in which I was doing monthly visits to see Shobhit in Los Angeles. Between 2010 and 2016, each year I vacillated between around 55 to 70 travel days per year; there's little chance I'll have that kind of frequent travel ever again. I wound up with 22 travel days in 2020, which originally had a plan to be much higher, but then of course the pandemic happened and the Australia trip alone accounted for around two thirds of all travel that year.

Shobhit gets annoyed sometimes with all the traveling I want to do. I'd probably do even more than I've already done if not for his resistance, and if and when he ever finds a job that pays higher than minimum wage, he may loosen up a bit about these things. In the early days of our relationship, we split all expenses where we could, but sometimes if he wanted to take a trip somewhere and I couldn't afford to pay for half, he would just pay for it. These days I pay for the vast majority of travel expenses.

Anyway, after Leavenworth, I have no travel plans for the rest of the year, but then it won't be far into 2023 before we're taking a massive trip again: late February and early March, to Australia: Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Kangaroo Island, and back to Sydney again. Beyond that, I have no clue what we'll do in 2023, although I'd sure love to make an anniversary trip to Toronto happen. That really remains to be seen. In any case, one of my all-time favorite things about travel is just the planning, and having weeks or even months of something I'm excited about that I have to look forward to. I love that.

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[posted 12:26 pm]