Tagged: Diversions

It’s 1970 and the one thing really bugging one Seattleite – enough to make him/her write a letter and, apparently, leave the city – was hippies.

“Seattle got so bad with hippies, I just had to get out of that city,” the anonymous writer told Mayor Wes Uhlman.

In addition to hippies, we found four other things really bugging people in the early 1970s on the Flickr stream of the Seattle Municipal Archives – communists, smelly busses, the United Nations and protesters.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – Tourists from around the world are flocking to the Monterey Bay to catch a glimpse of the massive marine mammals, including impressive numbers of blue whales, the largest animals on earth.

The Mars rover Curiosity has landed ... on Mars! And it's having a pretty lonely but humorous time of it, according to the rover's mock Twitter feed. 

SarcasticRover: "HEY EVERYONE! Hope you kids have fun writing shitty memes on my HI-RES PICS! After all, THAT'S WHAT I'M HERE FOR!"

On the Seattle section of Reddit, a user-generated content aggregator, the user poltergeister asked the question: What is something you wish Seattle had?

The responses have been interesting and got us to wondering the same thing. Here are 10 things Reddit users want. Vote for your favorite and share yours in the comments below.

To promote their new movie – “The Campaign” – actors Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis blazed into a Seattle cafe to stump for votes in their faux election campaign.

The two are touring the country as if mired in a real political race, though they are “campaigning” to represent a district in North Carolina. Below is a video of their event in Seattle.

For those of us who have not gotten around to it, don’t want to stand in line for it or are afraid of heights, we sent our online news intern, Evan Hoover, to video his ride on Seattle’s waterfront Great ‘Ferris’ Wheel.

Here’s the the ride in under 3 minutes:

Mostly, we’re thinking of your mental health a couple months from now.

You come here in July and August and it’s glorious: There’s two snow-capped mountain ranges, a couple of towering volcanos, lively outdoor markets, flowers and greenery, an expanse of blue water every which way you turn ... miles of lake, Sound and ocean beaches ...

Then come the other 10 months.

GOLDENDALE, Wash. – Each year on a long, steep stretch of looping highway in southeast Washington, hundreds of skateboarders test their grit. A helmet, a leather body suit and wicked skill are all that stand between glory and a face full of asphalt. It’s called the Maryhill Festival of Speed near Goldendale.

Maryhill Loop Road is 22 turns and 2.2 miles. And on a skateboard it’s just a fleeting few minutes to the bottom of the Columbia River Gorge.

Nearly 300 young men and just 11 women showed up recently to take on this twisted ribbon of pavement.