Seattle Christmas Trip–Part 1, A trip without the big Redneck Express

Well, Dawn and I are on the road once again, heading back to Seattle, WA for our annual Christmas Shopping Trip.

Sadly, this time around, the Big Redneck Express wasn’t able to go with us, instead we took little Redneck Express and decided to stay up at our favorite hotel, the Red Lion on 5th avenue.

Our plans this time out were to relax, enjoy being cooked for, and do some personal Christmas shopping.

With the memory of a bad accident lingering in our minds from the last time we drove something other than the Big Redneck Express up to Seattle, we opted to drive my 2-lane highway route that I had mapped out back around the time of the Fall Colors Rally a couple months prior.

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The drive was quiet, but not quite as spectacular as when I had driven through this area two months prior. The brightly colored leaves were long gone, but, unlike during the Fall Colors Rally, we managed to drive the route to completion without any jaw clenching incidents of panic caused by maniac Washington drivers and we arrived smooth and without problem at our Hotel.

We spent the evening relaxing, watching videos we discovered on YouTube about the scientists that had been studying the inside of the concrete sarcophagus of Chernobyl, then went down to Elephant & Castle, the local pub/restaurant in the basement of the hotel for dinner.

We decided to have dinner considerably earlier than we normally do, figuring that it’d be somewhat quiet in Elephant & Castle. Instead, we ended up with an extremely rude waitress and a group of drunk fools who needed to demonstrate that their manhood required high power magnification and electron microscope to measure, sitting behind us showing just how well they could make asses of themselves.

Dawn and I discovered long ago that no matter what we do and where we go, whenever we try to have a nice dinner out on a “romantic trip” we will always get seated next to a group of individuals whose inability to talk at a normal level of volume or subject of discussion will end up ruining the dinner for us.

So, we worked our way through dinner, helped along by alcoholic beverages of our own, and returned to our room. The waitress didn’t get a tip, though I was tempted to write a “tip” on the receipt, but was talked out of it by Dawn.