"You Should Get To Know Your Town"

"You should get to know your town..." So goes on passage from a song by The Clash sung by the late great Joe Strummer.

And it's true.

Knowing your own city, where you live, its merits, its faults, its beauty and its underbelly, meeting the people who live where you do...all are well worth doing. Otherwise, you live an isolated bubble and are disconnected from your community.

One way you can connect (or re-connect) with "your town" is to be a tourist in your own city. How many times has someone come to visit you and they end up seeing more in your area that you have? Or, conversely, how many times to you go somewhere and someone there says "you've seen more of this area that I have...and I've lived here for years."

Well. Go out and see your city, your area and your state.

My wife and I recently had the pleasure of hosting a friend from France for about 10 days. To show her a good time, we took her out to a lot of the Seattle's and the Northwest's attractions.

So for those of you living around Seattle or who will visit soon, I'll make things easy for you. Here are the great things we did that you can do too:

• Visited the Pike Place Market - shopped, gum wall, lunch, views
• Had dinner at the Space Needle - expensive, but good food and you can't beat the view
• Walked the campus of the University of Washington - beautiful
• Went to the Golden Gardens beach park - sun, sand, dead on view of the Olympic mountains
• Took a ferry to Bainbridge Island for the day - so nice. Water sports, great restaurants, great views of the city
• Went to the Oregon coast - yeah, a bit if a drive, but still worth it if you can get there
• Went on a day hike in the Cascade mountains
• Went shopping downtown
• Went out to dinner in Ballard - so many places to choose from in old Ballard
• Took in a Broadway production at the 5th Ave Theater
• Dinner downtown
• Had brunch at the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge and hiked down to the falls
• Went to a Seattle Sounders FC soccer match

We have done mostof these things before, but it had been while for many of them. Having the opportunity to re-engage with the greater area to show a guest the highlights of our city was a delight.

So yeah...we got to "know our town" even better.

Do the same wherever you are!