Eating, drinking and having fun

Though the day started early (at 8 am) and though we lay awake again from 2 am on, it was a fun day of eating, drinking and sitting on the bus. For „Adventure Day“, the day after the tourism convention, we had chosen a culinary tour in the Tacoma metro area and though it was a big group of 28 people in a large bus, it was a nicely organized and interesting tour.

First stop was a coffee roastery (Dillanos Coffee Roasters). This company is "custom-roasting" coffee mostly for little cafés, especially for coffee stands which are to be found often along the roads here in the NW. Interesting thing was a coffee tasting workshop where we learned about single origin coffees - e.g. the difference between a Guatemalan and an Ethiopian coffee - about different blends, light and dark roasts etc.

Fisher Scones on the Washington State Fairgrounds is an old institution in town, just serving scones with butter and strawberry jam, for $ 1,25 a piece. In case we should run out of money on our way down the coast we've always a box of "Scones Mix" in our luggage now. Beer was next: Narrows Brewing at the Narrows Marina at the southern tip of the Pudget Sound. In this beautiful location with the Olympic Mountains as a pittoresque background brewmaster Joe Walts gave us a tour through the brandnew facility and we got a chance to try his beers. Liked the IPA best.



On to Chambers Bay Golf Course, a public golf course, right next to Puget Sound. They are getting ready to host the U.S. Open in 2015. In their excellent restaurant we got a cooking demonstration of their chef ("how to make beer batter") followed by a three-course-meal consisting of clam chowder, Ale battered pacific cod with hand cut potato chips and mini desserts. Stina Cellars from Lakewood/WA was serving wine. Liked their „2006 Montage“ (without knowing how expensive it is), but not particularily their sweeter varieties (Siegerrebe and „Sweet Beginnings“). Back in Tacoma we got dessert - or rather, we had to decorate our own dessert - at „hello, cupcake“ and Savor Creperie. Frankly, could have skipped that part - very sweet!

We’ve had a lot of fun all day with Maureen and Cole and Hiro and after sweet cupcakes and Nutella-filled crèpes we decided that we’ll need another beer at the nearby local Harmon Brewery to celebrate the end of GoWest Summit before we parted. Looking forward to meet you guys again in Chicago soon!

Amazing Art and Car Collection

Yesterday was the last „official“ day of the GoWest Summit. It’s been another day packed with about 20+ appointments, this time we could have passed on about two thirds of them. Lunch in the Convention Center wasn't noteworthy, but to feed a couple of hundreds of participants is not an easy job.

A nice change inbetween appointments was that we were invited to the Topping Off Celebration of the Art Museum’s new wing in the afternoon. That’s an amazing story and never conceivable in Germany: an art collector gave his whole collection of Western Art to the Tacoma Art Museum on condition that a new building - for which he paid a large portion - will host the collection. In a short period of time a fund raising campaign fetched $ 15,5 mio. (!) and now the new building is supposed to open in fall 2014. The most amazing thing is, that the collection belongs to a German couple by name „Haub“. Didn’t do research on them yet, but apparently they are still living in Germany most of the time (besides having a ranch in Wyoming and some place in Tacoma) but apparently didn’t want to give their collection to a german museum. Seems like german buraucracy stroke again so that they decided to give their collection to an american museum …


Appointments ended at 5:30 pm and the 7 pm evening event took place in the LeMay-America's Car Museum - a huge collection of classic and vintage automobiles, trucks, NASCAR vehicles and motorcycles. The museum was spectacular, food and wine not necessarily. Fingerfood, again, which means getting greasy fingers while eating and having to balance a plastic plate and a glass while standing. Different restaurants were serving their signature dishes in miniature portions and by far the best was the smoked salmon, but there were always long lines. One Washington winery was present and their wines were o.k. Back to the hotel at about 11 pm.

A busy day

We’ve had 25 business appointments today, from at 8 am to 5 pm. Half of the people who had chosen to meet with us (we didn’t have a choice, but were assigned) were interesting, half were boring and just reeling off their promotional texts. We sat at our designated table # 55 all day, with a 1-hour-lunch break, in a huge ballroom with bad air quality and no internet. Got two invitations for the one night still missing on our way from San Francisco to L.A.: Solvang and Oxnard. Not sure yet what we’ll choose. And, received a couple more invitations, so that we started planning our second next trip already, to Colorado and the Four Corners region. Somehow we are always ahead of time, at least when it comes to trip planning…

Yesterday in the evening we attended a reception in the Tacoma Museum of Glass and met our japanese friend Hiro again. A couple of years ago we were on the same post fam tour to Yosemite NP and had a good time. Though we can’t communicate much - his English isn’t too good and our Japanese is even worse - it’s always fun to meet this very polite, good-mannered, calm guy – who always relies on our beer recommendations.



During the evening event we watched a glass blower create a big whale, a band was playing and we had a couple of bites and some beer and a lot of smalltalk. As usual on such occasions it was mostly standing room and therefore not too comfortable. Back at the hotel at 10 pm, but nevertheless just slept till 2 am and lay awake most of the night.

Sun was out for a change today for a couple of hours and for the first time we were able to admire Mount Rainier in its full beauty. Landscape is gorgeous. Wished we could explore the islands and Olympic Peninsula, but not this time. Already talked to some Washington tourism reps - perhaps we'll be back in fall 2015.

Still sorting through business cards and paper material and still have to answer emails - bone-tired.
Good night!

Rain, and more rain

Apparently Seattle is living up to its reputation: it rains... out of buckets since yesterday in the afternoon. The GoWest Summit (about 600 participants, buyers, suppliers and a handfull of journalists) started today but it's been a pretty calm day for us. We attended a couple of lectures on tourism in general which were all amazingly interesting and met with the local tourism rep for a city tour in the rain.

Tacoma is a very clean, easily walkable city with a couple of highlights: the History Museum (which we visited yesterday in the afternoon to avoid to fall asleep too early), the Glass Museum (Dale Chihuly, the glass artist, is from Tacoma), an Art Museum and a great historic railroad station (Union Station). Also, the culinary scene is not bad, lots of very diverse restaurants. Yesterday in the evening we still checked out one of the local breweries: Harmon Brewery., and they had a great IPA! We will attend a reception in the Glass Museum this evening and there they'll serve more local brews and food. Better get ready ...

In love with Morgan Freeman

Watched „Last Vegas“ on the plane - with Morgan Freeman - and laughed more than I might have laughed the last couple of months. Usually don’t watch nonsense like that, don’t watch a lot of movies or TV at all, but I can tell you: it’s sort of salutary. Love Freeman since I watched him in „The Bucket List“. Since then we have a picture wall in the hallway which shows pics of "adventures" we have done to date and a list of others which are still on our personal bucket list. And it helped to burn time on this 10-hour-flight. Which is actually not that long, considering that our final destination was the West Coast. Flight time to NYC is not much shorter, we flew an apparently short northern route over ice and snow covered landscape and had a beautiful view of the Rockies.

Got up at 3:45 a.m. this morn and a friend of us, Silvia, picked us up to drive us to Munich Airport. Can you imagine: It’s sunday, 4:30 a.m. in the morning, and the autobahn - all three lanes in one direction - is shut down because of some stupid accident. Don’t know what happened, but we had to detour on side roads. Since we’ve had the same story in the past, when we drove our friends Chris & Dave to the Airport and when they missed the plane because of a full closure of the autobahn, we got flashbacks and became a bit anxious. But, despite of the detour, we made it in good time. Flew from MUC to FRA (which is a horrible airport) and got on the plane to SEA, an Airbus A330-300, which departed about 40 min. late, but arrived on time.

We were flying Lufthansa for a change, usually choose UA or Delta, but got a free flight because of having collected miles with UA and were able to take the direct flight with LH (which is cooperating with UA) from FRA to SEA. To tell the truth, LH is better than American airlines. Attendants are friendlier, prettier and younger, you get two hot meals and snacks inbetween (though food is in general the same grub everywhere in Economy Class) and if you want you can get drunk for free.

Flight was very smooth, no turbulences, passed immigration and customs in Seattle in a record time of about 30 min. The congress bus was waiting outside and brought us to Tacoma in our booked hotel, which is pretty nice, large comfortable room, bath tub (!) and a window which can be opened. Up for about 20 hours by now. Will go to register in the nearby congress center, try to find something to drink and to stay awake till evening.