granite idealism

As you may or may not be aware, Jody and I returned on Sunday evening – just in time to watch the Boston Red Sox complete their sweep of the Colorado Rockies in the 2007 World Series - from our vacation to the Pacific Northwest (PNW).  This is the first in a series of sporadic “catchup” entries recapping our adventures in Seattle and Portland…

When our plane landed at Sea-Tac close to 11:00pm Pacific on Wednesday night, we headed down to baggage claim to meet up with Chris, our host with the most for Night #1 in Seattle.  The last we heard from Chris, he was trying to secure a vehicle to pick us up.  Unfortunately, it turned out that he was unable – which was no big deal to us - so he gave us directions on how to take public transit to Downtown Seattle where we would meet up and Chris would bring us to his apartment near the University of Washington.  We found the stop, paid our fare, and proceeded to find seats on the bus before receiving a call from Chris suggesting we abort our mission and track down his roommate Shuly, who apparently had just landed, too, and was getting a ride back from her friend Javier.

I had received a Facebook message from Shuly earlier that morning:

matt! i hear you are crashing at the legendary 5235 pad tonight, which is AWESOME! i wish i wasn’t coming in too late to get to hang with you guys tonight but hope your traveling is going well and i’ll see you soon!

… to which I promptly responded:

Shuly! Indeed – we have reservations at the legendary 5235 pad. We don’t get in til late anyway, so our paths may actually cross this evening. Might you be around the office tomorrow after 3pm? Excited to see you!

Now it hadn’t really occurred to me that our paths might cross at the airport, but as it turns out, we were on the same Delta flight from Cincinnati to Seattle – and we actually played online flight trivia against one another early in the flight!  Shuly was using her alias “VISTA” and, as soon as we told her that we were playing, she rightfully identified “JODY” as the flight’s Champion… ’cause she went to Susquehanna University and is wicked smaht.  Psyched to track her down and have a lift straight to our homestay for the evening, we exchanged handshakes and hugs and were ready to get going! 

We found out that Shuly was visiting our friend Jason, with whom I served as a Senior Corps Member at City Year New Hampshire last year, in his hometown of Birmingham, AL.  On the drive to Chris’ place in Javier’s sweet new ride (we’ll get to that later), I asked Shuly about her days at UMass-Amherst and if she knew of our newest Concert Corps artist with whom we had just partnered just the weekend before – Stephen Kellogg & The Sixers (SK6ERS) – hometown heroes of nearby Northampton, MA.  She did know them and actually loves them for their high-energy shows, which only now makes me chuckle because of how much our friend Jason reminds me and Jody of SK6ERS’ Goose (and vice-versa).  See for yourself below:

JASON (a.k.a. Tal Rico):

GOOSE (of SK6ERS fame):

See the resemblance?!  If anyone knows where we can find any video of Jason (preferably dancing with or without a torn ACL), please let me know.  Thanks! 

We also realized about 5 minutes into our ride that Chauffeur Javier was also a City Year celebrity, having recently starred in the organization’s new national recruitment video!  Fast forward to about 39 seconds into this clip for Javier’s moment of glory – which has been played tens of thousands of times at this point across the country (and a few more if you count YouTube)…

Of course Jody and I had to get our photo taken with Javier and his new ride - with incredible interior carpet, might I add - before he took off to go be famous elsewhere in King County.

 And that was only our first evening, friends…

Watch for PNW TRIP RECAP #2 coming soon to a blog near you!