Ash arrived on the Friday before the last weekend in August. The month itself had been so full-on that I’d barely had time to register that my time was up; it took a chance meeting with Neil & Vanessa on Saturday (“hey Ash, look — it’s some guy in a Mogwai T-shirt. Wait a second…”) to ram home the fact that I was leaving town — the four of us were, booked on a coach for Seattle the next day.

The accepted way to reminisce about an extended stay in another city or country seems to be to say ‘the time just flew by’, but I don’t think I could have said that about the previous three months. The passage of time ebbed and flowed with the months: June was distinctly manic, wobbling between entertaining nights out with familiar faces from the Vancouver office and fretful days trying to adjust to life in a new city and a new office. July went on for ever (which, coincidentally, is exactly how long the Tour de France dominated the Versus TV schedules), an oddly quiet interlude between settling in and working out what, exactly, I wanted to do with my time in an unfamiliar city. Then, August came out of nowhere like an extreme sports bookend to wrap things up in frenetic style. Though the trip to Seattle was just a short break for Neil & Vanessa, Ash & I were due to pick up a hire car so we could carry on the down the coast: the holiday we were about to embark on felt more like an extension to the summer than an end to it.

The hundred and forty mile coach trip to Seattle took about four hours. (The train is inexplicably both slower and more expensive. The mind boggles.) Once we’d arrived, it was less than a mile from Seattle bus station to the hostel, but, somehow we managed to spin things out so that I got to stagger along under my three months’ worth of luggage for a full forty-five minutes. Once we had checked in we picked out a few brochures from the rack in the hostel’s reception and checked out what Seattle had to offer.

We were a little nonplussed. It appeared that there was nothing at all to do.

Yeah, sure, you could go up the Space Needle or take an amphibious tour around the city and the bay in a WWII-era DUKW, but these were manufactured tourist attractions, artificial rather than organic, so to speak. We pottered around Pike’s Market near the hostel for a while — it is, unsurprisingly, a market, offering exactly as much or as little to interest you as you might find in any other — and then split up for a while. Ash & Vanessa did a bit of shopping while Neil & I visited Seattle Nerd Museum in the shadow of the Space Needle, then wandered back into town to meet up again for dinner. It wasn’t the worst day ever of sightseeing, but it was distinctly unsatisfying.

The day had been warm and sunny but the next morning was cloudy and grey, the sun failing to burn off the mist above Elliot Bay. We had the morning to kill before Neil & Vanessa were due to take the coach back to Vancouver, and without any particularly gripping destinations on offer we started towards the Columbia Center, a the tallest building in Seattle. The tower is a black monolith of an office building, tall, but from street level at least, not exceptionally so among the other buildings in Seattle’s CBD. We caught a lift up to the 42nd floor and then another up to the 73rd. The floor was deathly quiet when we stepped out. We bought tickets from a security guard and passed by him into the observation gallery.

The first window showed a featureless wall of white: we were looking out into a bank of cloud encircling the upper reaches of the tower. Looking down, — really, scarily far down — the cloud was broken into striated layers and pockets, with other tower blocks piercing them here and there, and occasional views right to to street level 900 feet below. We precessed around the gallery from west to east, glimpsing the Space Needle and the bay in the cloudy distance. It was an unexpectedly inspiring sight, and to my mind, it went quite a way to rehabilitating Seattle.

We said goodbye to Neil & Vanessa on the way to the car rental office, and as they settled back into the roomy seats of their coach for the journey north, we were gingerly piloting our recalcitrant, buzzing penalty box onto I-5 towards Oregon and ultimately California.