So I’m finally in Seattle! The last couple of days have been a little crazed. It all started with waking up at 6:30 in the morning on Saturday realizing I had fallen asleep still fully dressed and in my contacts without doing half the things I had planned to do after going out drinking on Friday and with only a half an hour before my dad was supposed to come by. I didn’t entirely remember what had happened the night before, which was unsettling, but luckily I had planned for this contingency and pretty much everything was packed and ready to go. Phone calls placed later in the day confirmed that I was a happy drunk and didn’t embarrass myself too much, but I could have done without the vague sense of nausea that followed me through my first driving shift.
We actually did the entire trip in two hour shifts, which seems to be the point where the road starts getting a little blurry after several hours of driving. We were both good passengers, neither falling asleep or getting lost in our books, and into Seattle around 10 o’clock Sunday night after a tough two day drive of about 28 hours.
The drive up here was long but fairly uninteresting. But it’s still amazing how even when you aren’t doing anything else but sitting and steering you can still feel wiped out at the end of the day, and we pretty much just checked into our hotel and went straight to sleep.
The next day we met my landlord and moved into the Amerihaus, which is a big house on the edge of the Wallingford neighborhood. It’s not officially a program property, as the program doesn’t provide housing, but the landlord likes working with Americorps and so automatically accepts anyone who is part of the program. And since City Year is one of the first programs to choose its members in the Seattle area it tends to fill up with our corps members first.
This year all 14 members of the house are City Year corps members. The house is two stories tall with a basement, three bathrooms, two kitchens and 14 rooms. It actually kind of reminds me of a frat house, with tons of stuff going on at any given moment. Hopefully it will stay free of the traditional frat house drama, although given that we’re going to be working and living together I don’t really see how it can.
At the very least it looks to be an adventure… which is what I was hoping for!