Senile in Seattle

"50th birthday? But you don't look 50!"

My adoring female fan club (membership closed I'm afraid, the club already has too many members) will be well aware of the fact that I have never looked my age. Normally a comment like the above would have me beaming from ear to ear. However at this particular moment in time I was using my age as the trump card in an ultimately futile attempt to get the British Airways check-in Rottweiller to upgrade us to First Class for our flight to Seattle, so I was not as pleased as you might expect!

Saddled with the burden of eternal youth, I had to make do with Sardine Class on the ten-hour flight to Seattle; naturally Angela was more than pleased to forego the obscene extravagance of First Class for the chance to sit next to me. The time passed quickly as we grappled with the Department of Homeland Security US Border and Customs Protection Visa Waiver Form, the most difficult questionnaire since O Level Religious Knowledge (which I apparently passed with a mark called "Ungraded").

Had we been members of a communist party, had we been involved in drugs use or dealing and had we been, or were we still, members of a terrorist organisation? After much head scratching we surprisingly answered No to all of the questions.The tricky bit, after copious gin & tonics and numerous mini bottles of wine dispensed by the most pleasant air stewardess we've encountered in years, proved to be the…… filling in of the date! Why do the Americans insist on putting the day and date the wrong way round? If we'd have held on to that colony for another hundred years we could have taught them to write correctly and, as an aside, had we held on for 150 years, we could have shown them the right (actually left) side of the road to drive on!

On a previous visit to the US we'd only just arrived in Los Angeles to visit our friends Jim and Linda when 9/11 happened. This time, and as a direct consequence, we were fingerprinted for the first time in our lives, not a problem if it keeps us safer! Having been warned that incorrect visa waiver forms would result in us going to the back of the very long and slow queue like naughty school children, it was a relief to pass through Homeland Security with a 3-month visa clipped to our passports.

Seattle, birthplace of Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing and perhaps surprisingly, Jimmy Hendrix, turned out to be a very beautiful and interesting city, a sort of hi-tech San Francisco with as many hills! It was obvious, as we took a Yellow Cab downtown, that this would be a good place to celebrate, if that is the right word, reaching 50 years of age. We booked in to a lovely new boutique hotel where the bath filled from a hole in the ceiling (a bit unnerving to start with especially if your dangly bits got too close) and where the staff were so incredibly friendly and helpful it made us feel slightly queasy!

The room was so hi-tech we only worked out the lights on departure and the minibar proved to be way too clever for us. We usually drink the (alcohol) contents and then re-fill before departure to avoid paying grossly marked up prices, and I suspect we are not alone in doing that? This being a very high tech wireless city we should have realised the fridge would send a re-stock order to the hotel computer as soon as we removed anything. Fortunately we left the champagne alone otherwise we'd still be there washing up!

My 50th was spent watching the Seattle Pride Festival, a riot of colour, noise and mostly semi naked bodies, where the women were dressed as men and the men dressed as women, some clearly not on this planet and others making their heartfelt points about equality or lack of it. Watching something like this brings home the incredible melting pot of beliefs and ideas that makes up America, it was an eye opener in more ways than one!

Being on the Pacific Northwest coast Seattle is famous for cloud and rainfall, rather like the UK, so it was a big surprise to have 4 days of temperatures like Botswana, above 90F and not a hint of rain. It was a pity then that we chose the 5th and worst day of our visit to go up the Space Needle, a 520ft vantage point on the area, with awesome views of the city, Puget Sound and Mt Rainier, an active volcano 50 miles to the south!

The global economic turn down is clearly biting even in an affluent area like Seattle. We watched on TV, in between adverts for gigantic meal portions and genital herpes (did you know 1 in 5 Americans have it?) as Starbucks announced the closure of 500 coffee shops. They could have hired me to tell them to do that, there is a Starbucks on every street corner in Seattle. The irony is that the coffee, like in the UK, is terrible, they really need to pop over to Spain for a quick master class. Bill Gates was also on TV, retiring that week from the day to day running of Microsoft. I just hope he paid in to his company pension fund!

Our plans to move on quickly from Seattle and head to Anchorage and the wilderness of Alaska quickly unravelled when we realised that we would be joining 50 million other people, mostly cruise ship passengers and similar idiots. The other smallish problem was that all the cars, RVs and motel rooms in Alaska appeared to have been blocked booked by cruise companies sometime prior to the last Ice Age.

There is always a Plan B of course, and if only we can think of one then there may be another update to this website.