ok, so here it is: my long-long-overdue report about my trip to seattle, washington.

first off: if you just want to view the photos, here are the links:
[view gallery: seattle/washington, part 1]
[view gallery: seattle/washington, part 2]

 
i left innsbruck airport on september 10th 2003, around 6.00 am. the tiny cessna airplane first went to linz to pick up about 7 more passengers (at most 10 were inside already), and then headed up to amsterdam, where my connecting flight would depart.

i remember clearly (nearly two years afterwards!) how i looked out of the window and noted that a screw was missing on the airfoil. it didn’t have many screws in the first place, being such a small plane ;-)

anyway, soon i was sitting in the plane to seattle/tacoma airport. i have no idea how, but the 11 hours of flight time went by like nothing – despite the boring/just bad movies they showed, like “legally blonde 2″! by the way: it’s interesting how airlines keep their passengers busy by giving out small portions of food (crackers, yogurt, kitkats, …). it works amazingly well!

after arriving at seatac, and having my sandwiches checked thoroughly by airport security (who would smuggle stuff in their sandwich?) it was off to meet the byers.
i hadn’t seen heather in person for a year (and then it was only some short smalltalk), and i had never met cindy and larry at all.
cindy and heather were waiting right by the exit of the escalator (cindy later explained that they had to …get rid of someone who had been occupying that spot earlier ;-)).

 
when we got to their house in federal way [G], heather and cindy showed me around the house, and said something like “just feel like home”. and i did – they immediately made me feel i had always been in the family. that alone was an amazing experience that i don’t think one is very likely to get in austria. the way i see it, people over here are a lot more secretive.
larry got home later that day from work, and we had heather’s vegetarian lasagna.

september 10th was actually the perfect day, as i had wished for it for a long time: the usual length of 24 hours, plus an extra 10 hours through time shift. i was pretty exhausted in the evening, though, so i couldn’t finish watching monty python’s “the holy grail”…

next page

so…
i have been wondering how i could utilize google’s free service www.blogger.com (with unlimited image storage) and tried to integrate it into my site.
now here’s the outcome: a travel section (instead of the t610-section that i was never going to finish anyway).

in this section, you will find a list/summary of all the documented trips and travels, and you’ll be forwarded to separate blogger-blogs once you click on any of them.
i know it’s not perfect. and although blogger leaves lots of stuff up to the bloggers themselves (you can create your completely own theme if you know html/xml), there’s some stuff it can’t do.
for example, i’d like to have four different images per line, but that’s not possible* because it there is no possiblity to create loops (the programming kind)…
* well, not possible if you’re not willing to manually integrate and link to every single image you’d like to publish…

also, the link for viewing the image in full size (usually 640×480) will take you to the images themselves, so there’s no layout around it, and no possibility to display further details or continuative links/slideshows.

but i realized that if my rate of traveling keeps constant – or even increases – i probably won’t have any webspace left by november. storing travel photos externally will give me a huge cushion.

so there you go – for a start i’ve moved the trip to hamburg (2004-09) over to blogger, and i FINALLY* got the pics from my trip to seattle/WA online! w00t!
*yes, it was about time. nearly two years afterwards is kinda late…

at the same time, i finished my travel journal flashback to the seattle vacation in sep./oct. 2003: see the next post