Fremont, Seattle

Leafy Fremont is a change of pace and scenery after the hot and busy landscapes of the North East. A lone motorbike thunders down a nearby street and the smell of freshly baked goods catches the air in a bohemian neighbourhood of small independent shops and street art. Amongst a backdrop of trees and water that makes you feel you are somewhere far more rural than one of the North West's major cities.

On the way to the local laundromat, we met the grey and dusty Fremont Troll, crawling out of the ground under a bridge connecting Fremont to Downtown Seattle. He let us pass but told us to send any goats his way whilst his coppery glass eye bore into us.

We later walked up the steady incline of Fremont Avenue with timber-clad and brick houses sitting up out of the green foliage as if built onto the trees themselves. Seattle is nicknamed the Emerald City and has been voted as having one of the top ten urban forests in the U.S. Trees are so extensive that they are considered to have a canopy covering 23% of the city's landscape. Yet there are plans to improve this further. The Seattle government has set a goal of 30% by 2037.

At the top of the incline we lunched in Fremont Peak Park, where from our small perch we gazed out across the urban forest to the mountains at the end of the horizon.

We found ourselves tiring in the late afternoon as our bodies adjusted to a further time change (Seattle is 3 hours behind New York and 8 hours behind the UK) so we chose to rest back at the hostel, cooking dinner is the communal kitchen before planning the next part of our adventure.Read more