Current Location: Hamilton, MT, N 46 15.829', W 114 09.456', elev. 3560 ft.

On saturday, I woke up and drove to Seattle Center, the area containing the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project.

My first stop was the Experience Music Project, a not for profit music museum founded by Paul Allen of Microsoft. The first thing you notice about the building is it is very very ugly. It is supposed to be some kind of awesome architecture job, praised by snobby architecture jerks, but to me, it just looks like a giant ate a lot of scrap metal and left a blobby metallic dump on Seattle Center.




I paid $20 for the admission (though I could have opted to pay $27 for a joint admission to Allen's Science Fiction Museum next door - too nerdy even for me). I'm pretty sure these two museums are a way for Allen to show off his riches and his interests at the same time, though you'd think one of the richest people in the world would have better looking teeth. The Experience Music Project was a bit disappointing. There were some outstanding exhibits, particularly on Bob Dylan and Seattle son Jimi Hendrix.

I was a bit disappointed, however in the Northwest Passage exhibit, which supposedly chronicled the history of popular music in the Pacific Northwest. Walking through the exhibit, you get a nice history lesson of the region, dating back to the Blues and R&B days of the 40s and 50's. As you walk through the exhibit, you see large exhibit panels discussing larger area acts such as the Kingsmen from the 60's and their hit Louie Louie, Hendrix in the 60's and early 70's and Heart in the late 70's and early 80's. As I got closer to the 90's I expected to see several display cases discussing some of my favorite bands, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains, all who helped put Seattle back on the map musically in the early 90's. I figured since Heart had a huge display, then Nirvana and Pearl Jam would each have their own huge display, but this was not the case at all. The early 90's "grunge" scene was almost completely glossed over, and the history and music of all those great bands (not to mention contemporaries Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Candlebox etc.) was all scrunched into one single small display case. In fact, looking in the display case, you'd think a band like Mudhoney whom most people have never heard of was as important as Nirvana. Outrageous. This exhibit is the reason I came to this museum, to see some memorabilia, relive the memories of some of the happier moments of my adolescent years, and they completely dropped the ball. When people think Music and Seattle, what comes to mind? Not Heart. Even more disappointing was the next two display cases, devoted entirely to the bands that came after "grunge", or were considered the backlash to "grunge" like Presidents of the United States of America and Sleater-Kinney. Left completely out of the display cases was Seattle rap star Sir Mix-A-Lot. All in all, the Northwest Passage exhibit couldn't have been more disappointing, and up until that point, I had been fixing to give the EMP a favorable review. But NO NO NO NO, it is not worth the money or time. I would set the price at $8. Some good things were the interactive exhibits where you could even record an album the way musicians really do, one track and one instrument at a time. Near the end of the museum I came to an exhibit called the Guitar Gallery, which contained hundreds of historical guitars, acoustic, electric, bass, you name it. This cool exhibit almost salvaged the museum. Almost. Paul Allen sucks. One neat thing I noticed was a glimpse into the recording studio had several computers for tracking and mixing. It was neat to see that although the EMP is mostly a Microsoft venture, not all the computers were running Windows. Two had Unix and two had Macintosh.

My Seattle photos can be seen here. I didn't take many, because I was really bummed out by the EMP. In a city famous for its rain, there was none the whole time I was in Seattle. I don't know whether that was the season, or just good luck. From the EMP, I walked outside and decided to go to the Space Needle, it was about 3 PM. However, being a saturday in the summer, the line to go up was very long. I probably would have been waiting around until 5 PM to get to the top. At this point, I was a little depressed and just wanted to get the hell out of the state of Washington. I decided to leave before I even got to see the prices to go up in the needle. I took a picture and left. I went back to my car and drove to the bay, pretty much to say my goodbyes to the Pacific Ocean.

I was headed back east.

Having lived all my life on the east coast, I associate inland with west. Its very weird, but that applies on the west coast too, so I often find I need to correct myself, because sometimes I'll think to myself or say to someone on the phone that I'm headed west from Seattle or Los Angeles, and really mean, inland, east. I know of one other person who has run into this problem, but would love to hear if others have as well.

Anyway, I left Seattle heading east on I-90. I started to notice for the first time, trucks, caravans, and SUVS, loaded up with a year's worth of living equipment; the comforts of home. I was seeing kids going back to college. Mid-state I turned south onto I-82, which eventually took me through a lot of desert land into Oregon. I was unaware that Washington or Oregon had desert. In Oregon, I-82 met up with I-84, which I took west to the town of Baker City, OR (N 44 46.887', W 117 48.745', elev. 3448 ft.), near the Idaho border, where I stopped for the night. Later in the week, I would be meeting up with my friend Keith in Colorado, so my plan was to head south from Idaho into Utah and do the stuff in Utah, then Arizona, then Colorado, before heading back north and doing stuff in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. However, I made these plans without really looking at my atlas, and when I finally did, I realized there were no effective paths back into western Wyoming, Idaho and Western Montana without going severely out of my way from Colorado. So I changed my plan a bit. Now I would travel through southern Idaho and into Montana, and then come south into Wyoming before heading to Colorado, and then do Utah and Arizona and eastern Wyoming afterwards. I pretty much lost a day because of this lack of foresight, because it would have been a lot faster to get to Montana had I continued heading east on I-90.

So I got up Sunday morning and headed east into Idaho, and lost an hour going into Mountain Time. Bummer. One of the first things I noticed in Idaho was that signs read Game Crossing, as opposed to Wildlife Crossing, which I had seen in other states. I headed south and west into Idaho, through Boise, with nothing much to report. Idaho is a huge state, and its size is deceptive, especially since it takes up only one page in my atlas because of its sparse population and relative density of roads. Most states, including a small one like Massachusetts, take up two pages. Wyoming, Utah and Alaska are the other huge are, one atlas page states. Idaho took a long time to cross. A long time. Just after Boise, I veered northwest onto Idaho 21. Don't bother looking, its not on the map. Because of its relative size on the atlas page, this looked like a promising road, as it would eventually take me into Missoula, Montana. I soon found out though, it was a mountain road, and had many twists and turns and a speed limit of 45 most of the way. Part way through this part of the trip, I was running low on gas, and since Idaho is so sparsely populated, I was concentrated on just finding gas quickly. I came across the town of Idaho City, and since I was so concentrated on finding the one backwater gas pump in town, I completely forgot to watch the speed limit. In town the speed limit dropped to 25, at least, that's what the officer told me. I was so concentrated on finding a gas station, I didn't even see him flashing behind me until I went to pull into the gas station. He told me he followed me all through town. He asked me if I knew why he pulled me over and I told him I had a pretty good idea it was for speeding. He said I was right, 49 in a 25. Ouch. I apparently glided right past him in my fog, so, I got hit with my second ticket on the trip, and first that I deserved.

I pumped my gas and headed the rest of the excruciating trip on Idaho 21. After Idaho City, the area did get quite scenic, as I was driving through the Sawtooth National Forest, and near sunset, I stopped to take a few photos, one of which I particularly like, since it contains all the colors of the rainbow.



Eventually, Idaho 21 ended and I took Idaho 75 north until it met with US 93 near the Montana border. I was getting really tired at this point, and came upon some motels, all of which had no vacancy, so I just kept driving north until I finally did find a motel with a vacancy, and with a very reasonable price, too, in Hamilton, MT. It was about midnight, and I went up to the room and just crashed for the night. Idaho had taken a lot out of me, but I finally beat it.