No matter where I went in Seattle, it seemed, I was walking uphill.
It’s not as if I’d previously failed to notice that the city is essentially built on a series of occasionally ridiculously steep hills, but when I was there for the recent Emerald City Comic Con this year, I was staying in a different hotel than usual, further from the convention center and requiring more of a walk there and back every day. I’m not complaining, because (A) it was a really, really nice hotel and I was surprised by how nice my suite was — including the fact that it was a suite, not just a room — and (B) I could do with the exercise, let’s be honest. Also, I like walking; it’s good for my brain as well as my body.
Or, at least, that’s what I thought until I walked down the hill towards what I thought was the closest coffee shop on the first morning. (It was not the closest; there was one inside the hotel that I wouldn’t discover for another couple of days.) You see, there are hills and there are hills, and this was the latter: a hill that I worried about walking down because it was so steep that I feared that gravity might take over and I’d careen down in a cartoonish circle of energy and disaster. Of course, down was the easy part — walking back up with tea and bagel in hand, I had to take to stop midway through because I was out of breath having forgotten to pace myself when climbing this particular paved mountain.
From that point on, I felt painfully aware that, no matter where I was going, I would somehow have an uphill climb ahead of me. Walking to the convention center? After a three block downhill stretch, all uphill. (And then walking back, that downhill stretch was, of course, uphill.) Going to breakfast with friends? Uphill. Headed out for a work dinner? Okay, that one was all downhill, actually — until, of course, I went back to the hotel after.
All of this came to a head on the last night of the trip, when I walked back to the hotel with a work colleague and we were complaining about the hills. At least we won’t have all these uphill walks, we joked, before getting to the hotel and discovering the elevators weren’t working. How did I get back to my room? Walking up eleven floors in the stairwell, puffing and panting the entire way.