Cruising the Neighborhood

Our new neighborhood totally rocks out. It is called Wallingford, and despite being right in the middle of Seattle it is considered a "quiet" and "close-knit" neighborhood. We have found that to be exactly the case. It almost has a small-town feel (except the houses are worth $500,000 plus and each placed on little itty-bitty plots of land). So when the weather was amazing on Sat I had to take a break and go out and take a few pictures to show you all my new digs.

The top picture is of our apt, which is the bottom of a triplex. From the front, all you see are our two little bottom windows and it doesn't look like much, but around back it's all ground-level and it's actually a very nice place.

The next picture is of the roundabout at the end of our block. There are lots of these in our neighborhood to keep heavy traffic out (it works) and they are often full of flowers (but I still don't know who keeps them maintained...).

The third picture down is an example of one of the many fancy houses that we're surrounded by. There are also quite a few 2-3 bdr homes, it seems to be a mixed neighborhood. People here have money, but it doesn't get flaunted around too badly. You see quite a few nice cars but they are often parked on the street and need to be washed. You see super fancy houses like the one above, but the lawn might be brown or it may end up being a rental property.

I tried to get a nice picture of the view. We live on the side of a hill facing the water, and across the water is downtown Seattle. It's a spectacular view. This means, at the end of each block, if you look south you gasp in amazement (especially on a clear night when downtown is all lit up). Unfortunately it wasn't very photogenic, perhaps because it's a bit far away so in the photograph all you see are the cars in front of the camera. Our neighborhood also has a nice playground about ten blocks away from us, and small but very popular shopping area with a grocery store (QFC), some restaraunts, and a few small but useful shops. I took pictures of all that but again it didn't turn out all that great, because there were people and cars everywhere and all I could get was one shop at a time instead of the whole experience. If you really want an idea of our neighborhood you may just have to come visit us. But hopefully the pictures helped.