Matthew Tuffin Blog

flickrphoto: 

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

My suitcase arrived the next day at 9pm that night, which gave me a huge sigh of relief. Not having the suitcase did have its advantages, giving me the chance to go out and get some new clothes.

Being in the Redmond area I located the nearest department store. Macys located in the Redmond shopping centre a mere 10mins walk down the road. For about 100 dollars I picked up jeans, couple of t-shirts, socks and jocks. (Oh and swimming gear I felt like a swim in the hotel pool).

Hotel sierra Redmond is a fairly new construction built only a year ago and houses all the latest comforts of a modern day hotel. There is free breakfast, pool, gym, a bar etc. The room as pictured has everything you could need and more. Even strangely it has a dishwasher, fridge, microwave and cooking top.

Suffering a huge amount of jetlag at 3pm that afternoon (3~4am in the morning Perth time) I headed back for a sleep. Getting up at 4pm I rushed out to pick up the hire car, a Chevrolet Cobalt and my first experience of driving on the (wrong) opposite site of the road. Car rental in Seattle is unlike Perth not tailored towards tourists, lots of people rent cars here. So much so that it felt like a production line, cleaning cars as they came in to send them back out again. As a reflection of that there is no state or city maps in the cars, the cars are not branded and all the GPS units are constantly out on loan.

As I set off on the short journey back to the hotel in the car, the words “Keep Right” kept ringing in my head. At first I had to concentrate a fair bit but then it became much easier. I must say now it is very easy to drive on American roads. There are no roundabouts, there are exit lanes on freeways, you can turn right on a red light (provided nothing is coming), the traffic lights are all set far above the street level so everyone can see them and the grid system of roads makes it easy to get where you need to go.