America: I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out

Following the trend of the trip, Vancouver's beautiful weather gave out on the day we left, and we drove to Seattle in the rain. We spent the first night in Seattle checking out the local breweries and the first morning checking out the local coffee. Both were excellent.

Surprisingly, the weather that morning was pretty good too, so it was time to explore.

Its like some kind of a needle, pointing at space.

The International Fountain.

All in all, Seattle is very nice.
But again I suspect it will be cold and rainy most of the time.

Whilst we were at the Space Needle, we found a museum. For some reason we wanted to go in.

Science Fiction:

The Babel Fish.

Rock Music:

Some sort of a guitar vortex?
It must be art or something.

And Battlestar Galactica:

Mark II Viper.

The BSG exhibit wouldn't let us use a flash, so most of the pictures aren't great, but my camera did face-recognise the Cylon Raider, which I thought was cool.

Because it was a nice day, we went for a run along the bay.

Then we went to a fight,

and a hockey game broke out.

I actually really enjoyed the hockey. We watched the Seattle Thunderbirds beat the Red Dear Rebels 4-1 at home. The game was in the Western Hockey League, which is a level below the NHL. I had been expecting basketball on ice. A fast game with a small number of players on a small rink, I expected everyone to rush to one end, hack at the puck and each other for a bit, then rush to the other end and do the same. It turns out that hockey is actually much closer to association football (soccer). Tactically teams need to keep their formation, build plays up from the back and keep possession by moving the puck around rather than just smashing it forward and hoping for the best.

As a sport, I've decided I prefer ice hockey to American football, but as a live event a collage football game is very hard to beat. For that reason, we were aiming to be in Eugene Oregon for Saturday's game. On the way to Eugene is Portland, and we hear they have some breweries, so we thought we'd stop by and check them out.

Dark chilli chocolate and stout from the Hair of the Dog.

The next day we got up and explored the city.

Then we went to more breweries and met more locals.

They told us to go to the Haystack.And see the beach.

Then we watched the ducks pants the huskies. The ducks, the home team, are ranked 1st in the conference. They're a lot of fun to watch.

We spent the next day on the coast road to San Francisco.