Woke at 4:30 in the morning with the combined wake-up call and alarm clock. We had stayed at the Boston airport hotel to leave enough time to disassemble our bicycles and still make our 7am flight. With that imperative, we quickly found one of the main points of conflict between Matt and I on this trip. I was quickly dressed and ready to go. Matt can't start the day without breakfast, which he ordered from room service since nothing else would be open at that time. The $20 price was obscene (Matt always eats a lot of food, but more importantly, the prices themselves were simply ridiculous). But when the breakfast came, Matt settled in to a leisurely meal and I obsessed over getting to the plane on time. Finally we left. I cycled the airport highway to the terminal and Matt did two trips on the hotel shuttle bus - one with his bike and one with the boxes. We spent a lot of time disassembling and packing our bicycles, and then got on line. That was possibly the wrong order, because 20 minutes after we got on line, about 20 minutes before flight time, they cut off the line, stranding someone who arrived just after that.

The flights themselves were uneventful.

In Seattle, after taking our time reassembling the bikes (along with two other people also assembling bikes) we headed off riding to Seattle. It was raining fairly consistently as we left the airport first on a sidewalk and then on a main suburban avenue that passed by the airport. The directions for bicycle access to Seatac, Seattle's airport, were good. I'd gotten them off of the web, at a Seattle bicycling site that I'd been referred to by a number of people who kindly answered a request of mine on Usenet for Seattle information. The ride was well-chosen suburban streets - no overly complicated intersections and turns made at intersections with traffic lights - by no means scenic but easy to ride in the light mid-day traffic.

We came into Seattle downtown through an industrial corridor as the rain seemed to be ending. A few blocks from the center of downtown we ceased following the airport route and started following the directions that Matt's friend Eric had given him to Eric's house north of Seattle. Those directions were quite poor and we got lost quite a few times as we went by the waterfront and crossed a part of Seattle's harbor to Eric's house north of town.

Seattle itself is quite hilly and occasionally has streets running at 45 degrees from the street grid, sort of reminiscent of San Francisco. Eric lives in a suburban house that's still on the urban street grid, about 8 miles north of the center of the city.