My Fair Lady - Spokane, WA part 1
I slept poorly, as I always do before a travel day. Anticipation and anxiety.
Woke at 4:25am, managed to slap on some clothing and brush my teeth and grab my suitcase before the cab got here (he is always 10 minutes early, which I love.) We drove to the airport chatting almost the whole way; this guy has been picking me up on these early morning rides for nearly three years now! I was sorry to tell him that this would be my last ride for a while.
The first flight was just fine, the second was slightly delayed but otherwise normal. As the pilot pointed out features within the Cascade mountain range, I couldn't see jack from my aisle seat and felt annoyed with myself for not thinking to get a window for the second flight. BUT, my stomach had been upset all day, so the aisle was probably the better choice. Stupid body! Eight hours on planes today.
I split an Uber with Elen (cello) and Michael (clarinet) and we made good time to the hotel. It's a recently remodeled Best Western and the rooms are ideal for tour life. Moderately spacious; plenty of counter space; a larger-than-usual fridge; a big sink with food service-grade hot water; a microwave. I'll take all of that over ginchy decor or vintage charm any day!
I dropped everything and went to a local co-op right next to the hotel.
It was rather small and I was a bit disappointed not to find many local products. But they have a nice hot bar and serve a $5 dinner on Thursdays, which info I was quick to share with my peers.
From there I walked to the next-nearest local grocery called My Fresh Basket. To get to it you have to cross a bridge over Spokane Falls. I was not prepared for how big, how fast-moving, how awe-inspiring this waterfall would be. You could hear the roar of the rushing water from blocks away. It was amazing. Watching TONS of water rushing so violently down made me feel small indeed.
We are here for a week and I will DEFINITELY be taking more footage, but this was my first time seeing it and I was awestruck.
My Fresh Basket was lovely, and much more what I had in mind for finding interesting and local products! I tried not to go TOO insane here because there are a lot of co-ops between now and the end of tour, but I did take home these gems:
- DOMA coffee: A sample-sized 1/4 pound since it's sold in bulk, I just wanted to try it. A lovely medium roast.
- Ladder Coffee Original Black: another local coffee, canned. Sometimes I like to get a canned coffee for bus rides.
- Heart Water Pink Himalayan Salt: I thought this would taste like, idk, Pocari Sweat or something, but it was just..."soft" water. Like it tasted very neutral. Pretty good, but I can probably make it at home.
- WET Hydration Orange Mango Ginger Turmeric: A hydration booster (so kinda like Gatorade) but with zero calories because it's sweetened with monkfruit. This tasted pretty good! I would definitely try their other flavors.
- Laurel Tree Rosemary Garlic Hazelnuts: I didn't know that hazelnuts were a big Pacific Northwest thing, but apparently they are because there were bags of them everywhere in all kinds of flavors. This was the most unique flavor that I found, and hazelnuts are my favorite so looking forward to trying these :)
- Fage Greek Yogurt Stracciatella: Not local, but I've never seen these "Creamy Dreamy" dessert flavors from Fage before and had to check it out! Will get to this in the 2nd half of the week I'm sure.
- Tillamook Oregon Marionberry yogurt: Tillamook sells marionberry and huckleberry yogurts and ice cream ONLY in this part of the country; I have never seen it for sale on the east coast. A locally-exclusive flavor that I wanted to try!
And I got my usual groceries too (fruit, veggies, plain yogurt, protein, etc.)
Back at the hotel I felt VERY tired, but managed to stay awake and also not eat dinner until 4:30 Pacific Time.
Unpacked, got settled in, and did go to bed around 8pm because that's 11pm Eastern Time and at that point I'd been up for like 19 hours, and I had to get up at 6am tomorrow for court reporting training.
But damn, what a lovely first afternoon in Spokane! I hope the rest of the week is just as good.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was awake early, mainly due to the time zone changes but also because I had Digital Court Reporting training at 10am ET, 7am PT. It went pretty well...mostly it was just walking me through where to upload audio files and how to document things. I still need to learn how to use their dictation software, and how to notarize things, and how to use the audio equipment...I'm nervous about all of this, but also, how hard can it be? The job sounds like something I can do, let's just put it that way, and although I'm bound to make mistakes at first if I am conscientious and take notes I should get better over time. We will see what happens but for now I'm optimistic.
After that I had free hotel breakfast, which wasn't as good as I'd hoped (few protein options) but getting free food at all is very nice. I tried to relax for most of the morning because my guts were still upset over something. I don't feel nauseous or anything, just, uh, "overactive"? So it could be nerves, or that I ate something that didn't sit well.
My caramels arrived around noon! Excellent, because then I could bring them to the theatre for opening night in Spokane!
We are in this convention center theatre, which has 2,609 seats. Pretty cool!
It's a modern and new theatre, and the only bummer so far is having to climb three flights of stairs to reach the Green Room (which is where I stashed the caramels for everyone to have easy access.)
The stairwell does have open ports to the backstage area though, which is SUPER COOL.
I'm not supposed to be sharing these so PLEASE don't reshare them, leave them here. Thank you.
Points of interest: to the right you can see a lot of ropes for the fly rigging system. To the left you can see wigs lined up in front of chairs for the actors (a lot of costume changes happen directly backstage.) And of course setpieces and our road cases and all that. Reminder that all photos can be opened full-size in a new tab for easier viewing.
The pit was a normal pit. Our MD is still out because he's got a nasty cold and didn't want to be coughing/sneezing/blowing his nose throughout the show while also trying to conduct, so took a sick day and our assistant MD Michael led our sound check and later the show. The show was very well attended, and the audience was awesome! Lots of cheers, laughter, and applause. It's going to be a good week if that's what we're starting off with!
Also, the caramels got RAVE reviews :) So many people stopped me in the hall to exclaim over them, and three different people said they were the best caramels they'd ever had. High praise! I'm seriously considering entering them in a State Fair competition or something (but I'd have to be actually AROUND for that to happen haha.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday turned out to be very productive.
I walked to Boots Bakery & Lounge right next to the hotel for breakfast.
This is an all-Vegan eatery, and here is their deli case (you can zoom in/open in new tab to read what's what):
I love innovations around vegan foods, especially all the ways that plant proteins can be manipulated to simulate meat textures and flavors. Everything here looked great, but there was a big sign above the register advertising their top-selling item:
Yep, I'll take one of those, thanks.
It was AMAZING. Huge fluffy waffle, moist but also crunchy and chewy just like a waffle should be. The "butter" on top was a soy compound with loads of Chai seasoning, it was spicy and warm and so good that the maple syrup really wasn't needed (but I had some anyway, c'mon.) I had intended to save half but ate the whole thing and then wished for another!
And then I just couldn't leave without picking up some vegan food for lunches and dinners! It was difficult to choose but on the recommendations of the employees I got a tofu breakfast hash, a potato croquette that they said is one of their top sellers, and a "sausage" veggie fritatta.
After putting those away in my hotel fridge, I walked to FedEx to ship Raven the coat she left behind in New Mexico. From there I walked to The Grain Shed, a local bread bakery and brewery that was a little under two miles from the hotel (so about 4 miles round trip)
It was a very small business but was absolutely HOPPING on a Wednesday morning. I dodged servers and bakers to get to the counter, and lost my place in line several times because I kept popping to the side to see the shelves of fresh bread coming out, and the bakers loading new trays into the wood-fired oven.
When I finally got my sh*t together, I got a half-loaf of Purple Egyptian Barley bread. I tasted a small piece, and the whole barley grains inside are awesome! They're crispy and chewy, and have a malted/beer flavor with a coffee-like bitterness. And the bread is fluffy and chewy, classic. Really going to enjoy this one!
Back at the hotel I had a little time to rest before a local LJ friend, geminiwench, scooped me up for a trip to Huckleberry's Natural Market!
We chatted along the way, about some of the economics of Spokane and how they're influenced by the city's openness to refugees of various countries (influenced in GOOD ways, and notably CULINARY ways!) and from there of course we touched on a little politics and climate change and whatnot :p Geminiwench is an amazing person who works for PBS and books/sources entertainment for programming and concerts. Hopefully that's a good description of the position...also, I feel like they might not want to define themselves by their job, so first impression was that geminiwench is highly intelligent, incredibly mindful, and engaging in an extroverted--but not overpowering--way, if that makes any sense. Like, they made me feel like a person, rather than an accessory to their outing or a point of entertainment. We were just two people on a grocery adventure. Which was pretty freaking cool :)
The market was awesome. I was a bit embarrassed to go through my normal gawking-and-squeeing pattern with someone there to watch, but it just had to be done. There were so many delicious things. Those wraps, btw, were MASSIVE.
The produce was especially good-looking, but I forgot to take a pic + am pretty well stocked from my other grocery adventures.
Geminiwench made sure to point out several products that they thought I'd like from having followed my journal...for example, they took me directly over to the baking aisle and showed me a favorite vanilla paste! And the huge variety of dried fruits, because they remembered that I eat a lot of oatmeal! And the breads and baked goods, which looked incredible (thank God I just got bread because otherwise I would have bought WAY too much here, omg)
I got the vanilla paste, and some dried pears. And found many other treats.
Because this is the end of tour, and life is short, too short.
We each got a pressed sandwich from the deli and a drink from the juice bar. I had a chicken pesto sandwich that was incredibly good, with a hot drink called a "bee"-something-or-other that was like hot cider with apple, pear, vanilla, ginger, and tasted like a warm hug feels. We ate and talked about the difficulties of being social online; of how eye contact used to be something you looked for, and now it's something you avoid; about how the pandemic and social isolation brought on many of these changes; about mindfulness, and how we view each other and the things we say to each other. This was a far more philosophical and in-depth conversation than I'd been expecting today, but I loved to hear what geminiwench had to say about all of this, about their perspective and observations, and I very much enjoyed the exercise of trying to see things from their point of view. As well as put myself under the harsh spotlight, for being impersonal and cold or even downright mean online more often than not. It is hard not to be defensive, and we discussed that, too.
We ran past geminiwench's return time, and I felt bad about that, and also that I hadn't grabbed them some of my homemade caramels after last night's show. Frick!! Argh. But hanging out for this short lunch-and-shopping was awesome, and I hope they had as much fun as I did today! Maybe we will meet again, and if not, I now know one REALLY cool person in Spokane :)
Back at the hotel I unpacked the goodies.
As you can see, geminiwench gifted me this awesome tote from their workplace too!
- Iggy's Kombucha: there were at least five flavors and I had GREAT trouble narrowing them down, ultimately ending up with two. I chose the tulsi flavor having recently been introduced to tulsi in New Mexico, and the other one because it has spices that appeal to me very much.
- Dry Fly Distillery Huckleberry Lemonade: A local distillery that does gin, whiskey, and vodka, and sells cocktails in cans. This one is a gift for Jameson.
- Tieton Cider Works Lavender Honey Hard Cider: I don't drink much but LAVENDER HONEY HARD CIDER. This one's for me!
- Misc Huckleberry Souvenirs: The little bag of coffee is for me, the white chocolate huckleberry fudge bar is for Jameson, and the jam is for us to share. Huckleberries are a big thing in the PNW!
After all of that I still had stuff to do, like research for court reporting and a few applications to touring companies and of course typing up this whole blog post. Jameson had his first physical therapy for his hand; it seemed to go well, and they gave him some sort of medical tape to try and help hold his inflammed vein/tendon in position while he plays(?) He has a gig on Saturday so I guess we'll find out how well that works.
And before I knew it it was time for the show.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I decided to post this before the evening show, so hopefully it goes well haha.
Today was long and fun, and tomorrow I have an early, busy morning of court reporting things. After that I want to do some more exploring downtown (the falls and some thrift stores, a break from foodie adventures.)
Woke at 4:25am, managed to slap on some clothing and brush my teeth and grab my suitcase before the cab got here (he is always 10 minutes early, which I love.) We drove to the airport chatting almost the whole way; this guy has been picking me up on these early morning rides for nearly three years now! I was sorry to tell him that this would be my last ride for a while.
The first flight was just fine, the second was slightly delayed but otherwise normal. As the pilot pointed out features within the Cascade mountain range, I couldn't see jack from my aisle seat and felt annoyed with myself for not thinking to get a window for the second flight. BUT, my stomach had been upset all day, so the aisle was probably the better choice. Stupid body! Eight hours on planes today.
I split an Uber with Elen (cello) and Michael (clarinet) and we made good time to the hotel. It's a recently remodeled Best Western and the rooms are ideal for tour life. Moderately spacious; plenty of counter space; a larger-than-usual fridge; a big sink with food service-grade hot water; a microwave. I'll take all of that over ginchy decor or vintage charm any day!
I dropped everything and went to a local co-op right next to the hotel.
It was rather small and I was a bit disappointed not to find many local products. But they have a nice hot bar and serve a $5 dinner on Thursdays, which info I was quick to share with my peers.
From there I walked to the next-nearest local grocery called My Fresh Basket. To get to it you have to cross a bridge over Spokane Falls. I was not prepared for how big, how fast-moving, how awe-inspiring this waterfall would be. You could hear the roar of the rushing water from blocks away. It was amazing. Watching TONS of water rushing so violently down made me feel small indeed.
We are here for a week and I will DEFINITELY be taking more footage, but this was my first time seeing it and I was awestruck.
My Fresh Basket was lovely, and much more what I had in mind for finding interesting and local products! I tried not to go TOO insane here because there are a lot of co-ops between now and the end of tour, but I did take home these gems:
- DOMA coffee: A sample-sized 1/4 pound since it's sold in bulk, I just wanted to try it. A lovely medium roast.
- Ladder Coffee Original Black: another local coffee, canned. Sometimes I like to get a canned coffee for bus rides.
- Heart Water Pink Himalayan Salt: I thought this would taste like, idk, Pocari Sweat or something, but it was just..."soft" water. Like it tasted very neutral. Pretty good, but I can probably make it at home.
- WET Hydration Orange Mango Ginger Turmeric: A hydration booster (so kinda like Gatorade) but with zero calories because it's sweetened with monkfruit. This tasted pretty good! I would definitely try their other flavors.
- Laurel Tree Rosemary Garlic Hazelnuts: I didn't know that hazelnuts were a big Pacific Northwest thing, but apparently they are because there were bags of them everywhere in all kinds of flavors. This was the most unique flavor that I found, and hazelnuts are my favorite so looking forward to trying these :)
- Fage Greek Yogurt Stracciatella: Not local, but I've never seen these "Creamy Dreamy" dessert flavors from Fage before and had to check it out! Will get to this in the 2nd half of the week I'm sure.
- Tillamook Oregon Marionberry yogurt: Tillamook sells marionberry and huckleberry yogurts and ice cream ONLY in this part of the country; I have never seen it for sale on the east coast. A locally-exclusive flavor that I wanted to try!
And I got my usual groceries too (fruit, veggies, plain yogurt, protein, etc.)
Back at the hotel I felt VERY tired, but managed to stay awake and also not eat dinner until 4:30 Pacific Time.
Unpacked, got settled in, and did go to bed around 8pm because that's 11pm Eastern Time and at that point I'd been up for like 19 hours, and I had to get up at 6am tomorrow for court reporting training.
But damn, what a lovely first afternoon in Spokane! I hope the rest of the week is just as good.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was awake early, mainly due to the time zone changes but also because I had Digital Court Reporting training at 10am ET, 7am PT. It went pretty well...mostly it was just walking me through where to upload audio files and how to document things. I still need to learn how to use their dictation software, and how to notarize things, and how to use the audio equipment...I'm nervous about all of this, but also, how hard can it be? The job sounds like something I can do, let's just put it that way, and although I'm bound to make mistakes at first if I am conscientious and take notes I should get better over time. We will see what happens but for now I'm optimistic.
After that I had free hotel breakfast, which wasn't as good as I'd hoped (few protein options) but getting free food at all is very nice. I tried to relax for most of the morning because my guts were still upset over something. I don't feel nauseous or anything, just, uh, "overactive"? So it could be nerves, or that I ate something that didn't sit well.
My caramels arrived around noon! Excellent, because then I could bring them to the theatre for opening night in Spokane!
We are in this convention center theatre, which has 2,609 seats. Pretty cool!
It's a modern and new theatre, and the only bummer so far is having to climb three flights of stairs to reach the Green Room (which is where I stashed the caramels for everyone to have easy access.)
The stairwell does have open ports to the backstage area though, which is SUPER COOL.
I'm not supposed to be sharing these so PLEASE don't reshare them, leave them here. Thank you.
Points of interest: to the right you can see a lot of ropes for the fly rigging system. To the left you can see wigs lined up in front of chairs for the actors (a lot of costume changes happen directly backstage.) And of course setpieces and our road cases and all that. Reminder that all photos can be opened full-size in a new tab for easier viewing.
The pit was a normal pit. Our MD is still out because he's got a nasty cold and didn't want to be coughing/sneezing/blowing his nose throughout the show while also trying to conduct, so took a sick day and our assistant MD Michael led our sound check and later the show. The show was very well attended, and the audience was awesome! Lots of cheers, laughter, and applause. It's going to be a good week if that's what we're starting off with!
Also, the caramels got RAVE reviews :) So many people stopped me in the hall to exclaim over them, and three different people said they were the best caramels they'd ever had. High praise! I'm seriously considering entering them in a State Fair competition or something (but I'd have to be actually AROUND for that to happen haha.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday turned out to be very productive.
I walked to Boots Bakery & Lounge right next to the hotel for breakfast.
This is an all-Vegan eatery, and here is their deli case (you can zoom in/open in new tab to read what's what):
I love innovations around vegan foods, especially all the ways that plant proteins can be manipulated to simulate meat textures and flavors. Everything here looked great, but there was a big sign above the register advertising their top-selling item:
Yep, I'll take one of those, thanks.
It was AMAZING. Huge fluffy waffle, moist but also crunchy and chewy just like a waffle should be. The "butter" on top was a soy compound with loads of Chai seasoning, it was spicy and warm and so good that the maple syrup really wasn't needed (but I had some anyway, c'mon.) I had intended to save half but ate the whole thing and then wished for another!
And then I just couldn't leave without picking up some vegan food for lunches and dinners! It was difficult to choose but on the recommendations of the employees I got a tofu breakfast hash, a potato croquette that they said is one of their top sellers, and a "sausage" veggie fritatta.
After putting those away in my hotel fridge, I walked to FedEx to ship Raven the coat she left behind in New Mexico. From there I walked to The Grain Shed, a local bread bakery and brewery that was a little under two miles from the hotel (so about 4 miles round trip)
It was a very small business but was absolutely HOPPING on a Wednesday morning. I dodged servers and bakers to get to the counter, and lost my place in line several times because I kept popping to the side to see the shelves of fresh bread coming out, and the bakers loading new trays into the wood-fired oven.
When I finally got my sh*t together, I got a half-loaf of Purple Egyptian Barley bread. I tasted a small piece, and the whole barley grains inside are awesome! They're crispy and chewy, and have a malted/beer flavor with a coffee-like bitterness. And the bread is fluffy and chewy, classic. Really going to enjoy this one!
Back at the hotel I had a little time to rest before a local LJ friend, geminiwench, scooped me up for a trip to Huckleberry's Natural Market!
We chatted along the way, about some of the economics of Spokane and how they're influenced by the city's openness to refugees of various countries (influenced in GOOD ways, and notably CULINARY ways!) and from there of course we touched on a little politics and climate change and whatnot :p Geminiwench is an amazing person who works for PBS and books/sources entertainment for programming and concerts. Hopefully that's a good description of the position...also, I feel like they might not want to define themselves by their job, so first impression was that geminiwench is highly intelligent, incredibly mindful, and engaging in an extroverted--but not overpowering--way, if that makes any sense. Like, they made me feel like a person, rather than an accessory to their outing or a point of entertainment. We were just two people on a grocery adventure. Which was pretty freaking cool :)
The market was awesome. I was a bit embarrassed to go through my normal gawking-and-squeeing pattern with someone there to watch, but it just had to be done. There were so many delicious things. Those wraps, btw, were MASSIVE.
The produce was especially good-looking, but I forgot to take a pic + am pretty well stocked from my other grocery adventures.
Geminiwench made sure to point out several products that they thought I'd like from having followed my journal...for example, they took me directly over to the baking aisle and showed me a favorite vanilla paste! And the huge variety of dried fruits, because they remembered that I eat a lot of oatmeal! And the breads and baked goods, which looked incredible (thank God I just got bread because otherwise I would have bought WAY too much here, omg)
I got the vanilla paste, and some dried pears. And found many other treats.
Because this is the end of tour, and life is short, too short.
We each got a pressed sandwich from the deli and a drink from the juice bar. I had a chicken pesto sandwich that was incredibly good, with a hot drink called a "bee"-something-or-other that was like hot cider with apple, pear, vanilla, ginger, and tasted like a warm hug feels. We ate and talked about the difficulties of being social online; of how eye contact used to be something you looked for, and now it's something you avoid; about how the pandemic and social isolation brought on many of these changes; about mindfulness, and how we view each other and the things we say to each other. This was a far more philosophical and in-depth conversation than I'd been expecting today, but I loved to hear what geminiwench had to say about all of this, about their perspective and observations, and I very much enjoyed the exercise of trying to see things from their point of view. As well as put myself under the harsh spotlight, for being impersonal and cold or even downright mean online more often than not. It is hard not to be defensive, and we discussed that, too.
We ran past geminiwench's return time, and I felt bad about that, and also that I hadn't grabbed them some of my homemade caramels after last night's show. Frick!! Argh. But hanging out for this short lunch-and-shopping was awesome, and I hope they had as much fun as I did today! Maybe we will meet again, and if not, I now know one REALLY cool person in Spokane :)
Back at the hotel I unpacked the goodies.
As you can see, geminiwench gifted me this awesome tote from their workplace too!
- Iggy's Kombucha: there were at least five flavors and I had GREAT trouble narrowing them down, ultimately ending up with two. I chose the tulsi flavor having recently been introduced to tulsi in New Mexico, and the other one because it has spices that appeal to me very much.
- Dry Fly Distillery Huckleberry Lemonade: A local distillery that does gin, whiskey, and vodka, and sells cocktails in cans. This one is a gift for Jameson.
- Tieton Cider Works Lavender Honey Hard Cider: I don't drink much but LAVENDER HONEY HARD CIDER. This one's for me!
- Misc Huckleberry Souvenirs: The little bag of coffee is for me, the white chocolate huckleberry fudge bar is for Jameson, and the jam is for us to share. Huckleberries are a big thing in the PNW!
After all of that I still had stuff to do, like research for court reporting and a few applications to touring companies and of course typing up this whole blog post. Jameson had his first physical therapy for his hand; it seemed to go well, and they gave him some sort of medical tape to try and help hold his inflammed vein/tendon in position while he plays(?) He has a gig on Saturday so I guess we'll find out how well that works.
And before I knew it it was time for the show.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I decided to post this before the evening show, so hopefully it goes well haha.
Today was long and fun, and tomorrow I have an early, busy morning of court reporting things. After that I want to do some more exploring downtown (the falls and some thrift stores, a break from foodie adventures.)