At Brouwer's cafe

I would suggest looking through their bottle list, not the cheapest but they have some good stuff! and go to Bottleworks, lots of good bottles are out

 

I was hoping to see a bunch of Fantome for the 13th. No such luck

 

While I've never been to Dover (or Delaware for that matter, as far as I know), from your description I'm guessing Aberdeen might be a good getaway if OP starts getting homesick.

Grays Harbor County—the Northwest's vortex of despair.

 

You picked the right time to come out. I know people who moved here in September and they didn't make it til summer. It's a great place to live, though. I've been here for about 20 years now and never looked back.

 

Welcome to the neighborhood!

 

What kind of awesome shit did they bust out to celebrate today?

 

Welcome to Seattle! As noted, you picked the right time to come here. Gives you a chance to see the goodness of the area & makes the bad weather tolerable. And you picked the perfect neighborhood. I hope to tip one with you some day.
P.S. I'm going to be in Philly in August with a side trip into Delaware. Maybe you will have some pointers for me.

 

It's OK in the summer, but man, the rain the rest of the year in Aberdeen/Hoquiam/etc. can be soul-crushing. My first job out of college was at the local newspaper there, and one day not long after I started, it began to rain. "Welcome to the next nine months," said someone in the newsroom. I laughed. He didn't.

I met a ton of great, hard-working folks during my time in Aberdeen, but the area certainly has had a rough go of it economically.

 

It's not just the rain, there's just a real depressing vibe in that whole county. I'm sure the people are great, but I swear the place is cursed. Nothing good has ever happened anytime I've been out there, and now I just avoid it.

• My friend got in a pretty serious car accident one summer when he fell asleep while driving down 101 on his way back from a camping trip, and right in the middle of hosting some kind of party at my house I had to drop everything and go pick him and his friends up @ the Aberdeen hospital (broken bones and all) and bring them back to Seattle. That hospital waiting room was a freak show in itself, I think it was 4th of July weekend or something and a lot of locals had clearly done some very stupid things to themselves.
• After a 3-day, 30-mile hike in the Olympics my car wouldn't start at some trailhead 15 miles from nowhere, so I had to wait til midnight for the tow truck to get me (sent my friends on without me)... then took until 4 a.m. to make it to this shitty hotel in Aberdeen (feeling pretty crusty after the hike mind you). On the bright side we did see a lot of black bears and elk on the hike.
• A cat at the Lake Quinault lodge bit my daughter when she was about 2. She was already getting sick, so we had to pack up and head home early.

Seriously, that whole area has bad juju.

 

The mall in Aberdeen is one of the most depressing things I've encountered in a first-world country.

It used to be thriving, but ever since the Wal-mart was built, the mall has become a soul-sucking ghost town. I don't know how it manages to stay open.

 

Agree that it's a depressing area -- in particular the South Shore Mall, as distantmantra pointed out.

Funny that you bring up a car accident as an example of "bad juju." When I was moving to Aberdeen, I was T-boned by a guy who ran a red light — literally 30 seconds after I arrived in town. My car was loaded with clothes and other crap, as well as my dinner, two Arby's roast-beef sandwiches. I went through one stop light and then got crunched at the second one. Roast beef and clothes were everywhere.

Maybe I should have taken that as a sign to just get the hell out. On the plus side, the insurance company gave me $2700 for a decade-old Pontiac 6000 that was worth perhaps half that. I had to move the phone away from my face when the adjuster told me the amount, because I started laughing audibly.

 

Maybe it's time for an opposing point of view:
My wife is from Aberdeen & while we were dating and the first few years of our marriage my memory of Aberdeen is great! Fishing on the Wishkauh, Chehallas, Humptulips, out of Westport on charterboat owned by my future sister-in-law's dad.Great people great times. A long time ago though. Hard times hit fishing & timber - not much else to keep things going but we still enjoy our yearly trek back. Still, I only know people who are from Aberdeen not in Aberdeen. Sad.

 

This guy is moving to Seattle, not Aberdeen. That's like comparing apples to oranges. Seattle is a big city with lots of great things to do. Aberdeen is a small town on the way to the ocean where the main attraction is the local Wal-Mart.

 

Yeah. How'd we get on Aberdeen, anyway? Conversations do that. Chill.