Found some cheap tickets and flew up Seattle to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends of ours. We had never flown Virgin America before, and were pleasantly surprised by how interesting they made the flight with mood lighting and music. We'd fly them again if they went where we needed to go.
We spent a lot of time wandering through the downtown area, popping our heads into various shops, checking out their central library (which is enormous), exploring Pike's Place Market, and just enjoying being outside in the rain.
Was amused by the auto rickshaw's the police used to give out parking tickets. In college, a friend of mine wanted me to make a movie about guys cruising around Wisconsin in an imported auto rickshaw. With some money and an ounce more gumption it might have happened.
On Thanksgiving day we volunteered with our friends and their church at a downtown mission, helping serve a Thanksgiving meal to the homeless. Afterwards we had our Thanksgiving dinner with their church friends, in a lovely evening of good food and company.
It was a fun to see such lush mountains. I never realized how important trees were to me until I moved away from them. Yes, they have trees in Los Angeles, but not like they do in the Wisconsin countryside where I grew up. Seattle has trees like that though, and it was interesting to learn how important logging was to Seattle's founding. My ancestors were lumberjacks, so I felt connected to my surroundings while we visited.