So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

-The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Honestly, this ended up being a pretty uneventful trip. But seeing as there was some baseball involved I figured I should share. My reason for visiting Seattle was to participate in the half marathon. Unfortunately I'm a fatass and never really got my training up to where it needed to be. Since I was flying all the way up there I tacked a couple of days onto the trip so I could catch a Mariners game.

On Saturday (instead of running a half marathon) I pretty much just walked around a lot. By my calculations I ended up walking about 8 miles that day so it wasn't a total loss. I began in the Seattle Center area which is where the Space Needle is but it was crowded due the marathon so I left. I quickly worked up an appetite. Seattle is NOT a breakfast town. Pretty much impossible to find a cafe that opens before 8am. I hopped on a ferry and went off to Bremerton (which is home to the greatest band of all time, MxPx). As you can see in the picture, the weather was pretty nasty for a marathon anyways.

There really isn't anything to do in Bremerton. Mostly went to get some pictures of the city from the water and briefly visit the hometown of my favorite band just to say I had been there. The one tourist thing they have is a tour of a destroyer which was used in the Vietnam war. I was a bit disappointed it was a self guided tour, but it was enjoyable nevertheless.

After returning back across the sound to Seattle (1 hour each way), I went to Safeco for the stadium tour. We only got to see the visitor clubhouse as apparently they had some thefts on the home side. Here is the visitor locker room.

We then went out to the visitors dugout. They happened to be doing some sort of corporate event (all those tables in the infield) that day so I got cheated out of the owners box and the fancy seats behind homeplate. The guide had an interesting story about the batter's eye. Seems that it reflects the evening sun quite well and they've tried multiple colors and materials to fix the problem. It sounds like after more than a decade later they finally found something that works.

It was also interesting to hear that their majority owner has never seen the team play. Not even when they played a game in Japan that would have been a quick train ride away. For a roofed stadium, I kind of like the place. The roof really is for the rain and not the temperature which means its more of an umbrella than a roof. It doesn't feel too enclosed. Chase field on the other hand feels like they dropped a ballpark into a giant warehouse. The concourses at Safeco are wide and you can see the field as you walk around. Up in the pressbox I learned that the official scorer uses a series 1 tivo, which just seemed oddly low tech me.

On Sunday I did all the tourist stuff. Went to the top of the space needle. The space needle was nothing special, the stratosphere here in Vegas is much more enjoyable. Went to Pike Place Market which is way smaller than I thought it would be. It's three stories tall, but most of that is little old ladies selling earrings made out of seashells. The EMP museum was okay, lots of interactive exhibits and whatnot. The science museum was a crappy knockoff wannabe Ruben H. Fleet museum. I also went on a harbor cruise tour which was actually informative and worth the money.

View of the city from the space needle

View of the space needle from the harbor cruise

Monday I went back to the stadium to catch an American League (fake baseball) matchup between the Mariners and the A's. They have a pretty cool area in the outfield where you can heckle pitchers in the bullpen.

I got some pretty decent seats on the terrace level. A bit of the foul area was obstructed though. Wish they would have told me before I bought the ticket. I didn't have problems changing seats though as the attendance was terrible. I tried some of the local cuisine. I had a deep fried oyster po' boy for about $7 which was pretty decent. I also decided to try their clam chowder in a loaf in order to compare it to Petco's. Safeco's was discusting, the soup tasted like it came from a powder mix or something. Also Safeco's chowder was $10 compared to Petco's $7.50.

Near the end of the game the roof started to close. I was unaware they could close it mid-game, but I guess they could. Took only like 8 minutes and was completely silent. The tour guide described it as the alien ships floating above the cities in Independence Day, a pretty good description.

A's ended up winning 1-0 from a homerun they got in the early innings. A pretty decent pitchers dual. Thankfully a quick game too as I was tired and didn't even have a horse in the race.

Seattle people were pretty nice. I got a handful of comments about my padres attire but nothing mean spirited. Mostly just pleas for the padres to go easy on the mariners and stop kicking their asses this year.