Aliens ate my brains

Jet lag makes you stupid.  It's almost as if some evil aliens came and sucked out your brains.  The intellect is impaired, speech becomes slurred, and coordination is utterly lacking. You are a mere shell of your former self. Luckily, the condition is neither fatal, nor permanent.

Because we're wide awake in the pre-dawn hours, we've been taking advantage of the quiet of the morning to explore the area.  Saturday, we decided to have breakfast at the Bay Café in the Fisherman's Terminal.  After scrambling around trying to find safe passage through the maze of busy roads and industrial areas,

we arrived at the advertised opening time of 6:30 only to find another similarly mis-informed group waiting hungrily outside.  The cafe doesn't open until 7 on Saturday, despite what the website says.  The food was worth the wait (if you like fish), and the charming staff did their best to drown us in coffee (I'm not used to the concept of the bottomless cup!).

We strolled along the waterfront, and looked at the nets and fishing boats, a family of ducklings, and the local amenities (Fishermen's Union, HazMat training facility, Seafood wholesalers, net sheds).

Surprised to find so many lawyers offices in a fishing port. Not far from the café is the memorial to fishermen lost at sea, with floral tributes around the base.  Fishing is the most dangerous occupation in the United States, twice as dangerous as mining, but you rarely hear about the loss of lives at sea unless it's a passenger ship. Perhaps it's because I'm a Coastguardsman's daughter, but I found the memorial very moving.

Fishermen's memorial, bronze plaques bear the names of those lost at sea.

The main part of the day was spent driving around with Suzy, our real estate agent. She gave us a tour of potential neighbourhoods, and began to get an idea of what we want.  Cycling distance to D.'s office without having to go up and down steep hills, not too huge, but the right dimensions for our furniture, and space to store a tandem without disassembling it.  A lot of the modern places we saw had great kitchens, wonderful views, and odd-shaped rooms with sloping ceilings. Our first stop is always the bedroom, because if the four poster won't fit, there's no point in looking further.  In retrospect, buying a hand-made, solid oak, 7+ ft tall bed when we knew we were going to move to England (and eventually back) was probably not the most sensible thing to do.  On the other hand, the movers have yet to destroy it, unlike its predecessor which was converted to kindling.

It's a glorious warm sunny day today, and I long to be out on the back of the tandem, but it's in a container waiting to be loaded on board a ship, and we've got more potential housing to look at; in other words, duty calls. . .