I live in Seattle so I think that disqualifies me in my current position.

I grew up in Philadelphia. We lived within the city limits, but up in the far northeast where it felt pretty suburban. It was roughly an hour to get to Center City by transit. To me that was a fairly easy and natural trip, and even as a young teenager, I felt comfortable doing that to visit my aunt and uncle who lived down near the Franklin Institute, and my first year of college I traveled from one end of the Frankfurt elevated line to the other, after taking a bus from a bus stop near my house. In other words, visiting the center part of the city I lived in, which was about an hour away, was something I would do at a minimum of once every two weeks, or every day while I was in college.

I also lived about two hours from New York. That’s two hours given that I had to get to one of the train stations on the Northeast corridor and go from there. Probably a 90 minute drive if I was feeling rich, had gas money and money for parking. But that always felt super inconvenient. I would go to New York, maybe twice a year,

I would also go to Washington DC probably once every three years.

I realize that some of this is privilege. I wasn’t rich, but I could scrape up money for train fare, and restaurant meals a couple times a year. I know that not everybody can do that.

It’s still amazes me that people live a few hours from a major city and haven’t been there very often. Come in on the first Thursday of a month and visit one of the museums for free. Get the cheapest seats you can for a sports event and go feel the atmosphere of the stadium. Just walk around like a tourists, even follow the tourist brochures. My mom always told me that those circulating tour buses aren’t the best deal, but if you use it the first day you visit a city it’s an economical way to get a great overview and make notes about things you wanna go back and do.

If you’re outside transit range, and you don’t wanna drive in the city, drive to a transit park-and-ride. Treat it like an adventure. Worst case, you can check it off your list. Best case, you find out it’s not that scary and there’s things you like and that it’s pretty affordable, especially if you don’t pay to park in the city itself.

If you really need your car and you don’t wanna try transit, use an app like SpotHero to find cheap parking. If you’re young, and you have good legs, it doesn’t have to be close to the tourist things. Even four blocks away, you can usually find cheap parking, and I mean four blocks away from almost any of the tourist stuff in Seattle.

Last native tip for Seattle specifically: most of the Amazon buildings offer free parking all weekend. A web search will give you more details. Parking on the Amazon campus in Southlake Union, put you a few blocks from the space needle, a few blocks from the museum of history and industry, a trolley ride away from Westlake Mall. You can walk the entire distance from the southern stadium sports complex, to the space, needle, mostly along the beautifully rebuilt waterfront, and it’s only about 2 miles.

This is a very Seattle specific booster post. Sorry for going off the rails.