Still getting adjusted to “West Coast time”—I was up at 6:30 AM PDT/9:30 AM EDT which would be sleeping in except I didn’t go to sleep until 1:00 AM PDT/4:00 AM EDT!!! 🥱 Thank you jet lag!

Despite the apparent lack of sleep, we got a decent start to our day. We decided to venture out via car 🚗 to Fremont for some Dough Joy Donuts. This was my sophomore trip to this donut shop after the stellar experience last time. I have a dairy allergy which prevents me from eating most normal donuts, but their entire donut offering is 100% DAIRY FREE (vegan, but that includes dairy free)! The best part: you ABSOLUTELY CANNOT TELL that they are vegan. If you come to Seattle, then you can compare these donuts with regular donuts and see which would win in a contest!

Since we were in Fremont, we decided to park and check out the town a little. We got another round of drinks (non-alcoholic since it was only 10:30 AM) and went to find “the Troll”.

Not an actual troll (like the kind typically found on the internet), but a giant troll with an affinity for beetles from Volkswagon. This troll lives under a bridge where he’s able to rest and feed on unsuspecting cars that drive by! He looks grumpy, but only because he had a booger stuck—I was nice enough to help him out!

We also managed to stumble into a PCC for some Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies and to a “vintage mall”. I wasn’t really sure what to expect as we went down the stairs. I had it in my head that it was just an old underground mall with a bunch of shops, but it was closer to a antique store but filled with 80’s and 90’s stuff. Which, sadly for my age, it probably antique at this point.

We then headed to the Museum of Pop Culture (a/k/a MoPOP). This was my third time at MoPOP this year, but even then I was noticing differences between the visits—and it was fun to see the rest of our group experience it for the first time.

Some of the exhibits include a Fantasy/Medieval exhibit, Horror Movies, space-themed, Indie Video Games, Hip Hop culture, and the new Ruth E. Carter exhibit. Ruth has done costume design for some of the biggest movies, including Selma, Malcolm X, Roots, Coming 2 America, and Black Panther! The details in those costumes was amazing and it was easily the highlight of the museum.

My second favorite exhibit wasn’t an exhibit at all, but a mockup of the building itself. I randomly found it tucked away on a floor (in plain view but off the path). It shows how the building was visualized before being built, and I found this architecture breathtaking given that there are no right angles!

Afterwards, we stopped for lunch at the Armory (food court near MoPOP and the Space Needle) and headed back to the apartment to pack up and leave! But before we got there…

Mount Rainier was out today! Pictures don’t do it justice, but it’s worth seeing in person—even from afar. Because of Seattle’s cloudy ☁️ nature, you can’t be guaranteed to see Mount Rainier. But of course, being a pretty sizable tech hub (two major cloud providers as headquartered in NW Washington)—someone built a Twitter account to tell us Is The Mountain Out?

Tweets by MtRainierWatch

We made it back to the apartment and finished our pre-trip preparations before catching an Uber 🚕 to the Bus Station. Because of traffic and our relaxed schedule, we actually only made it with about 10 minutes to spare! But on the bus we went to Canada!

We were late getting into Vancouver (but we made the bus 🚌 so it didn’t matter). We pulled in around 9:45 PM PDT and took a taxi 🚕 to the hotel.

While onboard the bus we were discussing dinner plans. Marie was meeting us in Vancouver coming in via airplane ✈️ and so once she landed her and the bus riders started working on a dinner plan. Since most of us are still on “East coast time” we opted to have sushi 🍱 meet us at the hotel while we took a taxi 🚕. For some reason, Uber/Lyft kept diverting the drivers away from the station, just as an actual taxi pulled up—so that was our option and eventually led to everyone arriving at 10:40 PM.

Since Megan’s birthday 🎂 is tomorrow—and the liquor store closes in 20 minutes—we ran across the street for celebration libations. Then the food arrived, and we sat in the room eating sushi and drinking whiskey!