New life, full of stuff

I have been spending a lot of time going places this week.  I know I'm not objectively driving a lot, but as someone who used to have to invent excuses to leave the house, this is an exciting change.  I've started actually being a useful person at the bank (for a very forgiving definition of useful), and then I get to run off to the U district to my internship.  I'm not sure about my impressions of that yet, so I'll just save my comments on that til later.  But it does give me an excuse to be on the other side of the Lake, which opens up other possibilities.

Tuesday night I went to a networking event in South Lake Union.  This distance is not great, but the volume of road closures and detours gave me a full tour of the Seattle Center and surrounding areas.  Thursday I grabbed coffee with a guy at one of the research institutes in south lake Union (I found a better way to get there while there wasn't traffic).  And Shaoshu's job has relocated to Belltown, so now he is super into hanging out downtown.  We grabbed a fancy drink on Thursday after he moved.  Well, the drink wasn't that fancy, but the Belltown hoity-toity place we were was...

Friday, after my shift as an intern, then as a teller, I got a call from Matt saying he and Jeffrey had ridden into the U district and would I like to check out the pub they are in, or maybe bring them the bike rack?  By the time I got there the three of them (Shaoshu beat me there) had recovered their strength with nachos and the crazy cyclists decided to ride the 20 miles home.  It was totally worth it though, there were girl scouts preying on heartbroken huskies fans and selling Girl Scout Cookies, so I got an extra box of Samoas- which totally fills the gap left by the boxes I already ate.

I would be interested to know if the rest of you who have more experience with driving in Seattle can speak to my main navigation conundrum.  I am wondering if it is really essential, when moving from one place in Seattle to another, that you drive past the foot of the Space Needle?  A couple times I did that, and I figured "how fun."  But is it necessary to be there when moving from U district to Belltown?  It just seems,... corny.