I am finding myself with some extra downtime this Sunday afternoon, so I thought I would save myself some time at work tomorrow and catch you up on my weekend now.
It was very much a Festivals Weekend. Completely by chance, both festivals I attended this weekend were on the Eastside: the Northwest Chocolate Festival in Bellevue on Saturday (yesterday); and the Issaquah Salmon Days Festival on Sunday (today). Yesterday was with Jennifer and Matthew; today was with Shobhit and Alexia. It worked out because Jennifer wanted to go to
another local festival today, which she hasn't had a chance to go to in a few years: Oysterfest, in Shelton. For this reason, she and Matthew arrived on Friday evening but headed home late yesterday afternoon instead of today as they normally would have otherwise. This actually freed up today for Shobhit and me to go check out the Issquah Salmon Days Festival, which Alexia had been telling us about.
But anyway, I guess I should back up to the first day of the weekend first: Jennifer and Matthew's arrival on Friday evening. Shobhit worked from 5-9pm both Friday and Saturday evenings, so he was gone when they arrived; he parked on the street so they could park their car in our spot in the garage as usual. They apparently left home as soon as Jennifer got home from work, having packed her bag on Thursday night, so they were very hungry when they arrived. I escorted them up to the condo to drop off their bags, and we were headed back out again within minutes.
I had looked online for reasonably priced restaurants near me, and found
Ox Burger, literally two blocks away. I have noticed it when walking past before, but never gave much serious thought to trying it out. But now, when I looked at
their menu, I saw that they will sub an Impossible Burger on any of their menu burgers, and they had a simple "cheesburger" item for only six bucks! $2 was added for substituting an Impossible patty, so that went to $8, before tax and tip. And it doesn't include any sides, so I did order the Hand Cut Fries for $6, which is pretty large, nice and crispy, and very well seasoned—Shobhit would have loved them. Anyway that took the total to $14, which isn't super cheap but still reasonable enough. I did not order anything to drink so in the end with tax and tip my total came to $17.77.
Jennifer and Matthew both ordered regular burgers
and they each ordered a cocktail—their drinks menu is rather limited and I didn't even like any of the options, but I was still kind of amazed this small burger joint with a limited menu even had cocktail options at all. Anyway I don't know what they paid but it was definitely more than I did.
On our two-block walk back to the condo after dinner, Jennifer reminded me that I had suggested on their last visit that we have dessert at
Coché Valley, the dessert crepe place on the corner of Pine & 15th in my own building—I had already forgotten! I'm glad she reminded me, even though I had already had more than enough food at Ox Burger. I even asked Jennifer, "Do you want to go upstairs and wait for a bit, or do you want to go now?" Jennifer replied, "We can go now."
Jennifer didn't even order a crepe in the end; she got a banana Nutella "Shibuya Toast" instead. Matthew ordered the exact same dessert crepe I did: the Banana Brownie. It's exactly what I had not long ago with Shobhit, and there are plenty of other flavors I could have tried, but this one is just so good and none of the others sound as good.
We then went upstairs and just hung out in the living room for a while. I made us all a hot apple cider with cinnamon rum added to it. Jennifer and I have a long history of quite boozy nights when we see each other, but she's been diagnosed with a condition I'm forgetting the name of. I just know it causes acid reflux burning in her stomach to such an extent that she takes even more Omeprazole than Shobhit does, and although she only sort of follows it, she's supposed to be on a diet that basically restricts her to only vegetables, lean meats, and only certain fruits (certainly excluding citrus ones). This therefore mostly excludes alcohol; she tells me she only has a drink once or twice a month anymore. Which is just as well, as I did not have the ability to get all that creative with cocktails, especially as over the past week or so our freezer's ice maker stopped working. I'm thinking maybe we should just go buy a couple of ice trays.
Jennifer started getting tired before Shobhit even got home from work. She was already in the guest room headed for bed when Shobhit got home, and Matthew followed Jennifer soon after.
They kept their car in our parking spot their whole visit, as they usually do. People from outside Seattle don't care for driving around the city if they can avoid it. This even applies to Gabriel, and he lives in Federal Way which is still part of metro Seattle; Jennifer and Matthew live outside Shelton, in a place so rural their street isn't even paved, and the town of Union isn't even incorporated. So, when I told them we could just take the bus over to Bellevue yesterday morning for the Northwest Chocolate Festival, they were all for it.
When I first looked up the bus schedule, it had us taking the Light Rail from Capitol Hill Station up to University of Washington Station, then transferring to the Sound Transit bus #271 and crossing the 520 Bridge. This itinerary took a full hour, which still didn't much faze Matthew or Jennifer. But, then we decided it was better to go out for brunch
before taking the bus over, so that we'd have some time for real food to settle before we spent a couple of hours gorging ourselves on chocolate samples. We were briefly going to eat at Lowell's at Pike Place Market, a place I still really like and would like to go back to sometime, but Shobhit managed to convince me to pivot: we went to
The Crumpet Shop instead. I had a custom crumpet with egg, pesto and tomato, and holy fuck was it delicious. Also, it was both lighter and cheaper ($16.86; I also ordered an Earl Grey tea) than Lowell's would have been.
With nearly an hour to kill after that, I walked them over to Rainier Square, so I could show them both where the downtown PCC store will reopen at the base of Rainier Square Tower late next year; roughly where the new PCC Central Office space will be next to it; and also the wonderful
public terrace accessed via the lobby.
From Downtown, we had a different Sound Transit bus to take, and its stop was literally diagonally across the street from Rainier Square Tower. It was the #550, and that one took all of half an hour from there to the Bellevue Transit Center, which is about a block from the Meydenbauer Center where the Northwest Chocolate Festival is now held.
As I predicted, we spent about two hours in there. I'm not sold on the idea that this festival is worth $45 per person just to get in, but as I noted to Jennifer, there is clearly a supply-and-demand element going on here: if the tickets were cheaper, it would have been even more crowded, and it already got plenty crowded in there. And we got general admission tickets with 11 a.m. entry; we could have gotten in as early as 9:00 but those tickets cost even more. Anyway, I have now done this festival
three times, and I think I'm done with it for a good many years, if not forever. Back in 2018 it was much more worth the price (and then it was closer to something like $35) because Shobhit did some volunteer work on day that then allowed him free access the next day; we effectively got in on a kind of two-for-one price. And the only reason I went both last year and this year, two years in a row, is because I had asked Jennifer if she was interested in doing it last year, she said a very enthusiastic yes, then bought her ticket—and then had to cancel because she got covid. I shared her ticket with Jennifer instead, and we just tried again—successfully, thankfully—this year. Even Jennifer, who was clearly happy to do it at least once (even in spite of her dietary restrictions) said she can't imagine going every year.
My 2018 and 2023 photo albums for the Northwest Chocolate Festival included 40 and 25 shots, respectively; photos of the actual Chocolate Festival counted 29 and 17, respectively. This year's album, because it doubles as "Jennifer and Matthew Visit 2024 #2," includes
a total of 42 shots, and 25 of them specifically from the Northwest Chocolate Festival.
The festival features
nearly 100 vendor booths, and it should be noted: after about a quarter of them, you already start to get tired of eating chocolate samples, the quality of which really tends to start to blend together. I wonder if anyone has devised a particularly efficient approach, because by the end of your rounds around the room, the last of the booths you walk past wind up kind of unfairly getting short shrift.
Last year there had been a Topo Chico station where people could get water to drink, which they did not have this time. That kind of thing is very helpful. When we left, I found a nearby coffee shop called Story Coffee where we could all just get a cold drink. I got a can of Olipop and it was not very good. I will never buy that brand of soda again. Blech.
Shortly after that, we made our way back to the nearby Bellevue Transit Center, and took the 550 Sound Transit bus back to downtown Seattle. The last stop northbound is on 9th and Pike, so a fair number of blocks toward Capitol Hill already; there wasn't another bus headed up the hill for another ten minutes so we just walked.
Shobhit was home, and we all just hung out in the living room for a while before Jennifer and Matthew left. They wanted to go out to eat for dinner, but I had not budgeted for dinner yesterday and didn't really want to go out yet again anyway. I think it might have been around 4:20 by the time they left; Shobhit left for work at the same time. "We're all leaving you at the same time!" Jennifer quipped. She and Matthew drove as far as Lacey, where they stopped and had yet another burger dinner. Jennifer texted me a photo of Matthew's giant burger with a knife sticking up out of its center.
That left the evening to me on my own last night. I got some stuff done. I watched last week's episode of
Agatha All along on Disney+. And later, I took the bus back down to the PCC office so I could meet Shobhit there after he got work, and we could pick up a bunch of pint samples of gelato that Noah told me to help him clear out of the freezer. And by the way, there were three boxes full when I left Friday, but I guess I should have grabbed some then. Some asshole swiped all the chocolate ones! We took what was left, which included two pints each of Lemon Curd; Marionberry; and Ube Coconut.
Anyway. I came in under budget yesterday with my eating out expenses. But, then went slightly over it again because at one of the Northwest Chocolate Festival booths I found a pair of $15 chocolate bar square earrings I could not live without.
I had found three pints of another brand of ice cream in the Merchandising freezer, and I swiped those too. We came home with nine pints of either ice cream or gelato. Some of the three Van Leeuwen ice creams were already eaten out of, in our defense. We finished two of them off last night. I texted Alexia to see if she was interested in any of the Hellenika gelatos, though, and she said both the lemon and the marionberry were "right up my alley." So we brought those to her when we drove over to Issaquah this morning. Only five pints left in our freezer now!
Both yesterday morning and this morning, my strategy was not to set my alarm for any particular time, just wake up, get ready without dilly dallying, and head out once ready. I wound up out of bed just a few minutes before 7 a.m. on both days. This morning, Shobhit and I were in the car and headed out right around 9:00. I was able to text Alexia our ETA was 9:32. Luckily, her apartment complex is an easy walk to downtown Issaquah and thus to the Salmon Days Festival, and she was easily able to let us park in front of her apartment building. We went in briefly to give her the gelato, and then we walked down there together.
The festival technically starts at 9 a.m., and we all got there at about 9:50. We first spent a bit of time at the Issaquah Salmon Hatcherie, which is basically the centerpiece of this
55-year festival. Beyond that, I found it to be pretty similar to just about any other local festival, just on a much larger scale than most: we all only learned recently that it's apparently the second-largest festival in the state—or, so I hear, anyway. I just spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find an online source corroborating this claim, which Alexia said she read on the festival website, but now I can't find it. I am finding sources calling it the largest
two-day festival, which is a pretty specific qualifier; ditto the claims I am also finding of it being the "second largest"
salmon-focused event, which begs the question: in what context, and what the hell is the largest? The "
World's Largest Salmon BBQ," I suppose? That happens in Fort Bragg, on the Northern California coast, about 174 miles north of San Francisco.
We were there a pretty solid two hours, just like I had been at the Chocolate Festival on Saturday. We definitely played our cards right doing Salmon Days in the morning, though. Alexia had really warned us of terrible traffic, but discovered yesterday that it wasn't quite as bad as it apparently was in the past, largely because of better organization, including parking areas with shuttles to and from the festival. Traffic was slightly worse today, she said, but we still managed to get out of the neighborhood just fine when we were done and back to the car.
Still, there were plenty of people there when we got there around 10:00, and when we were leaving at roughly a quarter past noon, the streets were
packed. We had already browsed most of the booths and walked the several streets of downtown Issaquah lined with vendor booths of arts and crafts and foods. Shortly after arriving, both Alexia and I got mini donuts, and Shobhit got bagels from Blazing Bagels. He actually bought some from the store so he could have them toasted, but we later still had sample bagel pieces from their booth outside the store. I should have taken a picture there, I don't know why I didn't. Anyway I later also bought grilled macaroni & cheese made with Cougar Gold cheese, and I thought it was fantastic. Shobhit predictably declared it bland because it did not have enough salt or pepper. He has a tendency to ignore when the whole point is to get the flavor of the key ingredient, in this case Cougar Gold cheese. I loved it.
We also shared an ice cream sandwich from a local vendor booth after that. I feel like I kind of dropped the ball with pictures; I could have gotten a lot more photos of interesting stuff. In the end, I got a
photo album with 21 shots. My favorite, though, is actually one that Alexia took and then texted to me, of Shobhit and me walking along the now-defunct railroad tracks that pass through town.
We walked back to Alexia's place, I used her bathroom, and we chose two of several champagne flutes she no longer uses and will likely later take to Goodwill. We drove to the Issaquah Costco for gas, then went inside for the hell of it, and wound up buying nearly a hundred bucks' worth of groceries. We drove home, but the groceries away, and here we are—another eventful weekend in the books.
[posted 6:09 pm]
