timblesworldtour

Seattle is one of the city’s I like in the USA, affectionately known by seattleites as the emerald city, due to it’s surrounding lush greenery, the city centre is relatively compact. In my opinion, the people of seattle are generally much friendlier than in many other USA cities.

Seattle has an interesting history, not least of which is the fact it is named after a native american, Chief Noah Sealth. The name Seattle is an anglicised version of his name. It is reported his grave inscription reads “Seattle, Chief of the Suquamps and Allied Tribes, Died June 7, 1866. Firm Friend of the Whites, and For Him the City of Seattle was Named by Its Founders,”

According to history, he was unusual in that he worked with many of the white settlers, although ultimately like most native americans, he ultimately lost out in the end.

Many of the place names are taken from native american names in the washington area, and the town we are staying in is issaquah (which I think is also native american), just outside Seattle.

See, a whole paragraph about Seattle, and no mention of the Space Needle. Damn!

Yeah, it’s corny. But here’s the truth, when you keep crossing time zones, over a short period of time, eventually it plays tricks, and you sleep at odd times of the day. Fortunately, upon our arrival at Sea-Tac airport, I was met by relatives who live over this way. Ironically, they will be away most of the time we are here, so we are dog watching, and fish watching. The dog is a slightly ‘excitable’ Golden Retriever called Angel, and the goldfish is called Nemo (with a silent N – actually it’s just called Emo, but I though the N might help??).

So here we are over christmas and New Year, in a large house with Angel and Emo the fish. And the rain.

So, like I said earlier, I had fallen behind on my posts, so the ones on New York below, were written after I had been. When I left NY, I flew across america again to the west coast to New York.

I should explain, the place I went to was originally called New York, it is of course now much better known as SEATTLE.

I have now flown twice with JetBlue crossing the USA, and I have to say, it really is an exceptionally good airline. In Europe, where budget airlines are dominated by the likes of EasyJet or Ryanair, the whole attitude is one of bad service “you paid a low fare – you get what you paid for” type mentality. Unfortunately a lot of passengers in Europe seem to really have swallowed this line, and put up with the most atrocious standards of service.

JetBlue offer free soft drinks, with snacks (although you need to pay for alcohol), and a 34 inch seat pitch (for reference this is the same legroom BA give you in Business class around Europe), and seat back TV’s with around thirty channels of live (satellite) programming. For example on one of my flights I watched an entire NFL football game live. This is all provided FREE!

The planes are comfy, the staff are friendly, and want to help, and their is free live telly and so on….Compare that to budget airlines in Europe, with crappy 29 inch seat pitch, no TV, Pay for all food, and so on, including the bad attitude. I just wish the guy who started JetBlue would start up in Europe, so the crappy budget airlines could just fade away.

The tag lines used by JetBlue, are pretty good too. The one I like best is “JetBlue isn’t the only way to fly…but it should be”. Too True.