When I was growing up in New York in the 1970s, I had this lovely image of the capital of our country’s Pacific Northwest region, thanks to a teen idol whose music my kid sister would play incessantly for a while there. Every day one summer, it was annoyingly toothy Bobby Sherman catchily belting out:

The bluest skies you’ve ever seen in Seattle,
And the hills the greenest green in Seattle…

And just those simple, oft repeated phrases fixed this city’s image in my imagination as an appealing place of eternal freshness – and over the years the more I heard, the more I liked. When I finally got to experience the USA’s fastest growing city in person (pop. 609,000, metro area 3.7 million), I found it to be delightful in terms not just of freshness – a temperate climate and a setting amid the, yes, verdant hills along Puget Sound, surrounded by evergreen forests and the Olympic and Cascade mountains – but a progressive, dynamic feel and a Seattle slew of cool attractions; museums; architecture both cutting edge and historic; and hot dining, nightlife, and cultural scenes. But the bluest skies you've ever seen? When they're blue, maybe, but here it's rainy for just over half the year, and sadly, smoke from what have become annual wildfires besmirch the skies for a few days every summer thanks to climate change.

Read more in my post Seattle Is an Exciting Evergreen.


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