Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Opinions on Seattle?

1970 ..............You just need a DeLorean.

Socialist/communist, highly populated, grunge music, support Burnie Sanders! memtb

One might try Bellingham WA, Aberdeen or Hoquium WA, some of the towns south of Seattle/Tacoma as a few have mentioned, many places in OR (again, mentioned by folks already, and even the Real Northern California (North of San Fran/Sacramento) especially west of I 5.

The Seattle area is now a wet version of SoCal. As a WA resident now, I wonder how long before the big push for more CA style restrictions on 2A rights. With a still fairly strong rural vote, our relatively good record on that might last a few more years, but if I'm not mistaken we now have to do background checks on private sales. Waiting periods and long gun registration won't be too far behind.

I lived in NW PA for a couple of years. I'm not sure where you're located, or how long you've lived there, but I know (from the 2000-2001 period at least) even in Erie there is no traffic situation that can compare with Seattle; Portland OR is not far behind. If you and your wife have never had to deal with large city traffic, it would be a good idea to come see, during the week, not on a weekend. Try to get across town between 7 and 8 AM to visit some attraction you'd like to see. Try getting from your hotel in the city to Tacoma. Go see Jimi Hendrix's grave. Go to Mt Rainier. Then come back at 4-5 pm. Traffic starts earlier than those times and runs later, but those are right in the thick of it. Try it for a week on vacation, you may decide you REALLY don't want to do city traffic.

My wife is in the Portland metro area. She lives about 20 miles or a bit over from her office. Using the decent public transportation system there, it takes an hour to an hour and a half to go that 20 miles. It can't be done much quicker in your car and one would then have to pay for parking downtown. I used to have the same situation in San Diego CA.

Do the math as they say. 24 hr day, 8 hrs for sleep, shower etc, 8 hours for work ( not figuring lunch), and 8 hrs of time for your use. Now take 2-3 hrs of that time for commuting. Are you or your wife willing to give up 25% +/- of your free time to sit in traffic?

Perhaps the compensation your wife would get might balance the equation. My wife is wishing now she had not accepted her position. The extra money goes toward higher housing costs (we rent), her commute is now over an hour instead of 15-20 minutes, and she has to ride public transportation with the loonies and homeless folks.

But, we're only 90 or so minutes (without traffic) from the ocean, we can see 4-5 snow capped peaks from the top of our street, and we're not in the smoggy central valley of CA.

AS for Seattle, I try to go around it when I have to get near it. Like LA when I visit family in San Diego. I'll go out of my way to avoid it.

Good luck to you and your wife in your decision making process.

Geno

Fantastic city if you're a people watcher and like to guess the gender of the goobs walking around. I think you'd love it.

Seattle would be a much better place for you than Austin.

We have a couple of nieces who have settled in the Seattle area. One of them is married to a tech geek who works at Amazon downtown, and they live in Kenmore and have some nice toys. When they want to commune with nature they go to a zoo. My brother in law has a nice vacation condo downtown overlooking Puget Sound, and we get to stay there whenever we want. A stay of one week every other year is really fun, but that is about as much as we could handle.

For dazzling urbanites who like to be able to walk to restaurants and bars, it is great. The Chihuly and EMP museums are nice, as is the waterfront sculpture park, and there are concert venues and sports arenas nearby. When we arrive at the condo we park the car and try to avoid getting back in it until we leave. Just getting the car out of the basement parking lot is a hassle and takes more time than my wife’s current commute to her office about a block away from the Wyoming State Capitol. Actually driving somewhere from downtown Seattle takes forever, and driving into downtown Seattle during semi-peak times sucks. The mountains in the vicinity are pretty, but we don’t get near them unless we are driving into or away from Seattle.

There’s no way I could live there permanently as long as I have the ability to hike and hunt and like close proximity to archery and firearms shooting ranges. After those days are gone, I could, in theory, but the bank account probably would not support it.

My aunt and uncle call wintertime in the Seattle area the "one hundred days of darkness".

Hah! It sure as fugg ain't sunny!

Being pretty damn far north, you go to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. Suns up from around 8 until 4ish.

Summer though is awesome. Still have pink light at near 10!

Northern Idaho...and to see the whale you'll have to check out the local bars...





If you like Rain, traffic, gridlock,liberals, and slowly going insane, you'd love Seattle....

Not a bad place to visit for a day or two every 5-8 years, but I could never imagine living there. I'm always more than ready to put the whole area in my rear-view mirror after a couple days. Honestly, if I had to live there, I'd probably just curl up and die within 6 months.

Seattle is where hippies crawled out of the sea.

The strong ones made it all the way to Austin. Survival of the dirtiest.

False

That would imply they bathed.

There's some damn big sturgeon in the rivers over there...

Since I left the NW in the early '90s, Seattle has been taken over by immigrants from the south who try very hard to make it North San Francisco. The city itself can't handle the volume of people and traffic, and real estate in the city has gone out of sight. As has been said, during commute hours, the place locks up. However, outside of those times, it's actually not a very big town and doesn't take long to drive across, or get the heck out of.

Once you are out of the city, you have some of the most stunning natural lands, small towns full of good people, small farms, fishing, hunting, etc. anywhere on the planet. If everything is good in your family life and you like staying active outdoors, the good feelings and endorphins of exercise will generally overcome the lack of sunlight. Just get used to the fact that if you wait until it's not raining to do something, you'll never do it.

The Skagit County area is home to some really neat little gun shops with impressive inventories, and a surprisingly nice indoor range, if that matters to you. The state is generally very pro-2A outside Seattle, although there's a thin scattering of hoplophobic, Red Book-reading granola moms all over the west side. Don't know how long the laws will last, though, as Bloomberg had success with a ballot initiative there and the current governor has issued executive orders to double down on that intrusion.

It would be a long commute, but if that's on the table, the Stanwood/Camano Island area is friggin' awesome for small town life, and still pretty open.

Austin= Seattle wanna be. But with 90% humidity and 100+ degree summers. And [bleep] up traffic

You couldn't pay me enough to move back to seattle, or the suburbs. I lived in suburbs for 6years finally talking the wife into moving to the country in 2009. It has gotten worse now even. My commute was 27minutes if I left at 4:30am, but by 8am it was 2hours, possibly longer. I still go there for business once in a while and I absolutely hate it.

Its a liberal mecca as everyone else already mentioned.

However if you are willing to move across the puget sound and add a ferry as part of your commute. You can live in paradise.

I was wondering where the Northern Idaho whales were.


Besides the rain and trees it's just like any other big city. I don't understand the comments about how it's an outdoorman's paradise around there. I guess just different ideas about what to do outdoors. I guess if you like rain and need the saltwater, want lots of people around, and need a bagel on your way to REI.

I know guys will find outdoor stuff to do just about anywhere they live, but to move there for it...

It would have to pay a lot.

Summers are nice in the PNW that is for sure. But I hate rain and there are places where it doesn't rain Oct-JUNE.

And he lives in Portland, where you can see where you want to go but have to go ten miles to get there and talk about rush hour traffic, it's worse than Seattle ever thought of being. Been there and done that going in all directions in both a personal vehicle and a 65' commercial vehicle.

Washington provides wonderful out door opportunities. Seattle has all of the society one would expect in a city, and it's fairly easy to escape those folks if one has adequate vacation time and transportation.

Best be a WELL paying job if one must live in the city.