On the road again - The Needle in Seattle and Mount Rainier in Washington

From Everett and the motel with the most questionable guests, who fired off firecrackers at night (we hope they were firecrackers and not cartridges...) in the neighborhood and otherwise presented a strange picture, we were happy to continue on our way. We had stayed in many cheap motels so far, but this was the least trustworthy in terms of the 'guests'... Anyway...

The weather was also really lousy: 15 degrees Celsius, gray skies... we weren't used to that. For two months, except for one day of rain in Chicago, we always had the best weather. "What should I wear?" or "Will it be warm today?" was never a question.

Keeping warm with long pants and an extra jacket, we set off for Seattle. Kerry Park was our destination. We had excluded downtown Seattle. Our experiences with American cities had deterred us from that. Just like in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the number of homeless people has increased significantly here in Seattle as well, and we didn't want to subject ourselves to that. Additionally, no city is really beautiful in gray weather... If, moreover, an hour of parking in the city costs between 12-18$, and parking garages score with reviews like "I wasn't robbed or murdered" or you often read that cars were broken into, we simply skipped this "adventure"...

In order to get a glimpse of the city and see the Space Needle, we drove to Kerry Park, which is located above the city. The drive reminded us a lot of San Francisco. Here too, there are streets that go straight up or down, interrupted by intersections or roundabouts... exciting, as you couldn't see in advance how the road would continue. The view over the city was really nice, despite the weather.

After Seattle and its quite confusing road layout, we continued on our way to Mount Rainier, which is about 4395 meters high, a volcano. After a long drive through the darkest forest with an incredible density of trees, we reached Sunrise Point at 2100 meters, which gave us the first glimpse of the mountain. Strangely enough, we didn't see Mount Rainier once during the entire drive from Seattle. We were very curious to see what the mountain looks like...

At first, Mount Rainier was shrouded in clouds and appeared very reserved. But with a little time spent on a few hikes around Sunrise Point, the cloud cover opened up a bit and here and there offered a view of the summit of the volcano.

Even though the mountain did not always show itself in its full splendor, the other views were quite beautiful. On the opposite side of the volcano, we could see the North Cascades, which we had visited ourselves yesterday. The distance from Mount Rainier to the Cascades in a straight line is almost 200 km. A remarkable long-distance view...