SEATTLE - HERE WE ARE!

HOW WE ARRIVED TO THE U.S 

AND 

“WHY ON EARTH ARE MY DIVORCED PARENTS TRAVELING TOGETHER?”

This is gonna be a long one...

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DAY NINE

It’s been a long day in the car. Energy levels has pended like crazy and the constant flow of snacks combined with the lack of real food has driven everyone to acting their age minus about 50 per cent.

We took the car to the ferry terminal, spent two hours on the most cheap-feeling boat I’ve ever been on (one person running a restaurant-like store that suppose to provide food for more than 150 hungry passenger, resulting in a every-man-for-them-self- kind of jungle manner when the chicken nuggets run out and the sales clerk is busy taking two families order’s at the same time as she answers four different questions). But ok, at least it was clean. And it took us from Canada’s border to the U.S, which is our next stop in this trip. 

So the border control was… interesting. 
On the Canadian side, a very nice man helped us with the nervewrecking process of providing fingerprints and declare the reason for entering and stuff like that, that makes us E.U citizens unnecessary nervous since we never have to go through that when traveling in Europe. (Good luck after december this year, U.K…).
The good looking guard managed our family and even laughed at my parents not-always-very-funny jokes and the whole thing was over in ten minutes.

On the U.S side on the other hand… OK it did go kind of smoothly.
Except they had a BIG dog sniffing around the arriving area.

One thing former friends and boyfriends had to experience firsthand was my phobia of dogs. I’m absolutely terrified by every dog that either a.) is unleashed b.) is big c.) barks d.) moves towards me e.) looks like it is about to kill me f.) which is all of them.

But except for the dog the U.S border guard was way less scary than expected and just asked the standard questions, made us leave a bag of possibly dangerous satsumas and then we were in. 

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We had 2 hours + of driving ahead of us, and Victor had gone into full butt-shit-crazy-mode, including talking in weird accents, singing songs about penises and talking back to every said sentence just for the fun of it. This trigged my “grown up” dad into joining him in harmonies, which nearly drove the Axelsson girls to insanity. 

We couldn’t have arrived in the salty sea area of Seattle sooner, and when we finally found mum’s friend that lent us the apartment for our week here we couldn’t get out of the car fast enough.

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The thing is, my parents are divorced and yet, they think it’s a good idea to travel around the world together. What worse is, I seem to be the only one bothered by their arguing. Maybe I just got enough of it when they actually lived together, but every time one of them talk back to the other something inside me breaks and I’m transferred back almost a decade in time, transformed into the younger me that tried to go between them and stop it. It has driven me so sad at times that I put on my urbanears without even listening to anything, just to try to get keep the sound out.

Well. I asked for some separation in a near future, and hopefully the traveling gods will hear my prayers and make dad go to the Boeing plant with Victor, leaving the rest of us with unlimited shopping time.

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Seattle, or the small part of it we’ve seen so far, is big. Like… big big. Outside our window you can see none of the sky, only million story buildings blocking the view. The traffic outside is never ending and you can hear the buses and cars growl and beep until late at night. So far, it seems amazing.
Only problem is there’s no WiFi. 

Yeah I know. Traveling is a perfect opportunity to look up from your phones and start exploring and find inner peace, and see a place for what it really is, and yada yada yada - except that it isn’t. Not for me it isn’t.
I need the web to publish my pictures and my stories, make them feel more real to me. I am like that, almost nothing is real until I’ve written about it. But not write for myself, as that leaves me with absolute no response and I easily go into self-destruct-confidence-mode. Also, it’s kind of philosophical: If something is written but nobody else than me sees it, it’s just a though turned in to paper. I have thousands of those, and they’re called dairy entries. They’re usually useless.
But when turning the words to the world, first then they feel real. 

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Enough thought for today. I let tomorrows pictures slip in here as I haven’t taken any today. It really is exhausting to be the photographer all the time. Sometimes I just don’t want to go around and look for interesting angles.

KISSES & STUFF

An exhausted idiot