Quiznos and Starbucks a Winning Combination!

Date: March 14^th, 2011

Drink: Grande Triple Skinny Vanilla Latte (Sims didn’t share with me this time)

Food: sorry Starbucks, we had Quiznos (mmmmmm)

the Sears Plaza on Northup and 148th Ave in Bellevue, WA

I realize that I’m about a month behind on my Starbucks posts…. With the commencement of Dancing With the Stars, and the ramp up before the Blackpool Dance Festival, I have had very little time to do anything else, and that means that while I’ve been taking pictures of our Starbucks ventures, I have not been able to update them on the blog.

Anyway, I’ve mentioned in my last few posts that we’ve been going to Canada on the weekends. We normally leave Vancouver at around noon, and if there is not terrible traffic at the border, we’re normally back in Bellevue by between 2:30 and 3:00, which gives us just enough time to grab some lunch. Luckily, the Sears Plaza is just up the street from the dance studio, and in that strip mall, Starbucks and Quiznos are right next to each other. This gives me ample opportunity to grab a coffee while Simeon is ordering lunch.

This café is very small, with nothing more than the barista counter, advertisements, and a couple of chairs, in front. But the seating area, narrow as it is, stretches back along the side of the barista counter. The configuration of the café is very much like the cafes we see often in London, where the retail spaces are about one room wide, but can extend up to three rooms back. For a lot of people from the studio, this is a regular hang out. The closer Starbucks, on the corner of 140^th Ave and Bel-Red Rd, is packed tight, noisy, and usually crowded with baby strollers. It’s a hectic location. But this Starbucks, on Northup and 148^th Ave, is a bit quieter and therefore a nice place to go for a little coffee and a wind-down.

Searching for Coffee in “Mormon-Town”

Date: March 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th, 2011

Drink: Venti Quod Vanilla Latte at least all three times, the new Cocoa Cappuccino (tall), Grande Nonfat Chai Tea Latte

Food: can’t remember everything we ate each time (we had breakfast every morning there), but I did try the Salted Caramel Square once, and it’s really good

Every year, we travel down to Provo, UT, for the NDCA Amateur DanceSport National Championships. We’ve danced this competition eleven consecutive times. We were Youth National Champions in 2002 and were National Finalists a total of nine times! We taught couples of ours to the title of champion at least 5 times, and we’ve taught a countless number of national finalists. The competition is held on the BYU campus, in the university’s basketball stadium, and given the popularity of ballroom dancing in Utah, there is normally a huge crowd of enthusiastic onlookers. NDCA President Brian McDonald fondly calls this competition the “Blackpool of America”, a piece of prestige not lost upon the attendees of this fun competition.

There is just one big problem with holding a National Championships in Utah: this area is primarily Mormon, and ballroom dancers are primarily not. Now, understand that I have nothing against Mormons. I hold Mormons as some of my closest acquaintances; and, something I want to make very clear, I highly respect Mormons and their values. It’s just that I am very much not Mormon, and I find the Mormon rules and codes to be restrictive to the extreme. This coming from a Catholic! Because the competition is held on the BYU campus, all competitors are expected to adhere to BYU’s dress code, which is so difficult because of the restrictions that oftentimes we cannot wear our normal costumes and frequently must have costumes made specifically for that event. But this is something I can deal with. What I have a hard time with is their restriction on coffee (and alcohol, but that’s for another post). If there are two things the Catholic Church does not restrict, it’s coffee and alcohol.

outside the Orem, UT Starbucks

There is no Starbucks Café in Provo, Utah. There is a Starbucks stand tucked neatly away inside a Barnes and Noble, but it closes far too early for us late night dancers. And not only is there not a Starbucks Café, there is actually no café that I know of in Provo. So we have to hop in the car and drive about 10 minutes north to Orem, to University Mall, to go to Starbucks. The nicest thing is that it’s actually on the way if you’re driving into Provo from Salt Lake City, which we did our first day there. We went in, found a seat, opened up our computers to do some work and enjoyed our long awaited breakfast. We were starving and I was in a nasty mood from my experiences with Delta Airlines, which you can read about on my other blog here: http://korastoynova.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/the-horrors-of-delta-airlines/

No sooner had we started into our breakfast than I looked up and the saw the mother of one of our preteen students walk in the door with her eight-year-old son in tow. “Hey!” she greeted with a cheerier-than-9am smile. “If there’s any place to find you, it’d be here!”

“Yeah!” I jokingly replied. “But who’s the one with the gold card?”

She laughed as she got in line. “You know it! I’ve needed this all morning!”

She hadn’t even ordered when three judges from the competition walked in, one of whom we are lucky enough to call a good friend of ours. “Well, hello you two,” said the judge in his soft German accent.

“Time for some, coffee, huh?” Simeon replied with a grin.

“Yeah,” the judge replied with a sly smile, “we have to get our own because [Organizer] won’t provide it for us. You know how it is.”

And yes, I do. There’s no judgment in his voice. Neither is there any in our friendly roll of the eyes. We don’t blame Mormons for sticking to their principles. In fact, we respect them for it. But let’s face it – we need our coffee!

a beautiful view of the mountains behind Starbucks on that cloudless Thursday morning

Starbucks Cafe on the Ridge in Snoqualmie, WA

Date: log date March 9^th, 2011; this is in fact a regular location for us

Drink: this time, Venti Quod Vanilla Latte

Food: this time, 2 breakfast sandwiches and 1 Chonga Bagel with 3 Cream Cheeses

Snoqualmie, WA

One of our regular cafes, the Snoqualmie café is not actually in Snoqualmie proper, but in a neighborhood of Snoqualmie appropriately called “The Ridge”. Many of you may never have heard of Snoqualmie, or if you had it means nothing to you. But the little town of no more than 5,000 or so people called Snoqualmie is the gorgeous, mountain town we call home. And I’m not joking when I say Snoqualmie is gorgeous. We live in the town proper, which is an old railroad town pushed up against a river called the Snoqualmie River that, it’s true, floods at least once a year. We don’t get hit by the floods every time, but you can bet the people living on the riverside do. You may be able to relate to the slightly larger neighboring town of North Bend, where a popular sitcom from the ‘70s was filmed called “Twin Peaks”. Snoqualmie is about a 5 minute drive west of North Bend.

Anyway, recently people have decided that Snoqualmie is a really cool place to live, but they don’t like the idea of floods. So developers tore out their cookie-cutter plans a built up a Stepford Wives looking neighborhood called Snoqualmie Ridge, called so because it is geographically up on the ridge overlooking the Snoqualmie Valley. It has none of the charm of a small railroad town, but all of the amenities you would expect of a Stepford Wives neighborhood. Hence (sorry, Starbucks, but it’s true) a Starbucks Café. That said, the café on the Ridge is actually quite nice. It’s big, has a large counter that not all locations boast, includes cute little sections instead of a more open floorplan, and even offers a book exchange which I think is really nice and doesn’t cost the café anything to run, since people just bring in their books and place them on the shelves, available for anyone to grab.

inside the spacious cafe

If you happen to be driving out east in I-90 from Seattle, or coming back in from the Pass, make sure to save a little time to stop in Snoqualmie. Simeon and I fell in love with the town the moment we drove through its 2-block downtown. Make sure you visit Snoqualmie Falls, the Pacific Northwest’s largest falls (in terms of cubic feet per second, I think), grab lunch at the Salish Lodge’s Attic Lounge, peek at Snoqualmie’s outdoor railroad museum, and get a coffee to go at Starbucks on the Ridge. Trust me, it will be worth your while.

beautiful Snoqualmie Falls, less than 2 miles away from Starbucks and (the other way) our house

Starbucks Cafe off I-5 in Skagit Valley, Washington

Date: March 5^th, 2011

Drink: Venti Quod Vanilla Latte

Food: Chonga Bagel with 3 Cream Cheeses, 2 breakfast sandwiches, 1 yoghurt parfait, and 1 protein plate

In my last post, I wrote about our goal to get our new Samba choreography down and (not perfected, per se, but…) practiced enough for performance at the Blackpool Dance Festival and at our Bulgarian National Championships in Sofia in June. During our lessons the previous week, we only managed to get half of the choreography done. We spent the week practicing the choreography and managed to come up, just the two of us, with another 15 seconds or so of more. So on the 5^th of March, we packed once more into the car and made our ways up to Canada, this time just the two of us. On our way up, we were hungrier than the week before, so we stopped at a Starbucks a bit closer to us than the one in Bellingham, in an area called Skagit Valley.

Simeon enjoying his bagel.

This café was great! The baristas were really on top of it. They were friendly, energetic (even at 7am on a Sunday morning), teased and played around with the customers, but all the way managed to do all of their tasks. They didn’t mess up our order once! I even saw the girl managing the drive through take a drive through order while she was cleaning the condiments counter. They did an amazing job of balancing friendly chatter with professional demeanor. Starbucks, if you’re listening, take note: the Starbucks off Exit 232 in Skagit Valley has probably the best workers I have ever come across! They definitely deserve some kudos for their attitudes.

And by the way, I apologize for the lack of pictures. After happily snapping my shot of Simeon chowing down his bagel, my iTouch ran out of battery. We’ll be going up to Canada again this Saturday, so if I get a chance, I’ll redeem myself!

Starbucks Cafe in Bellingham, WA

Date: February 27^th, 2011

Drink: Venti Quod Vanilla Latte, Grande Chai Tea Latte, Tall Latte

Food: 3 breakfast sandwiches, 1 Chonga bagel with 3 cream cheeses, 1 Classic Coffee Cake, 1 Yoghurt Parfait

Starbucks in Bellingham off Exit 258

You get the idea that we’re busy. Really busy. So busy that our idea of “home” is actually rather skewed. Most people think of being home as being physically home. We think of being home as being somewhere on the West Coast. Anywhere from California up to Canada. Therefore, when we’re “home”, we’re not actually home, per se.

We’re currently working on our Samba, revamping the routine and getting it ready for the Blackpool Dance Festival and, the weekend after, for our Bulgarian National Championships in Sofia. Both of those comps are in June, so we need to start on our routine now for it to be more or less ready for June. Anyway, our longest running coach lives up in Vancouver, BC. You’ve already seen him. There is a picture of me with him in my post about the Steveston Starbucks Café. You can read about it and see the pictures of it here: https://starbuckproject.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/steveston-british-columbia-canada/

lovely fireplace inside the cafe

We planned to start our routine with our coach on Sunday the 27^th, so we slept at the dance studio Saturday night and got up at 6:00am to leave by 6:30. Our lessons started at 10am in Vancouver, and we wanted to give ourselves extra time to drive up and to stop and get breakfast. For some reason, a couple of our students/friends decided they wanted to hop in the car and drive up with us. So three of us took off from Bellevue at 6:30 for our quick little road trip up to Vancouver. On the way, we pulled off at Exit 258 in Bellingham, WA, where we met up with the fourth member of our party. We sat down to a breakfast besides a nice gas fireplace and more or less had a great time. The workers at this café were lively and friendly even at an early morning Sunday, the food was good, and the café was large and comfy. Particularly beside the fire. I really enjoyed this café. Nice work, Starbucks.

Starbucks on Monterey Ave in Palm Desert, CA

Date: February 19^th, 2011

Drink: Venti Green Tea Frappuccino and Venti Vanilla Latte

Food: none this time

the lake beneath the chairs

Obviously, Palm Desert is not cut out for rain. It rained on Thursday night (much to our dismay, as we are from Seattle and seriously get enough of rain), and as the desert does not get much rain, it collected, very nicely, in some very interesting spots. I couldn’t help taking a picture of the pool of water just outside of the Starbucks café on Monterey Avenue in Palm Desert, which covered the entire outdoor seating area. That would never happen in Seattle. We have drains in the middle of everywhere. Of course, this is not a criticism on Starbucks. Why would they have drains? They’re in the middle of the frickin’ desert, for God’s sake! We, being from Seattle, just thought it was funny.

There are a total of three Starbucks Cafes in Palm Desert, plus a café inside the Desert Springs Marriott Resort. We go down to Palm Desert twice a year. I was able to log two of them on this trip. When we go down again in July, I will be sure to log the other two. Anyway, I have yet to have a bad experience in any Starbucks Café in Palm Desert. They always seem to do a good job. Some other cafes would do well to follow their examples.

El Paseo Starbucks, Palm Desert, CA

Date: February 16, 17, 18 and 19, 2011

Drinks: on the 16, 17, and 19, Triple Grande Skinny Vanilla Latte; on the 17^th, Venti Green Tea Frappuccino; on the 18^th, Venti Quod Vanilla Latte

Food: none (I was healthy and responsible and ate yoghurt with granola and a banana at the villa)

sitting outside the El Paseo Starbucks

One word describes this location: aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. My last post logged our trip down to San Jose in the last weekend of January. Since then, I’ve been in and out of our normal Starbucks cafes; we normally bounce between the only café that exists in our tiny home town of Snoqualmie, and the café a block away from our workplace in Bellevue, a high-rise suburb of Seattle. I still have yet to log these cafes, but I will eventually. Anyway, on the 15^th of February, we hopped on the plane (first class, thanks to our MVP Gold upgrades) and headed down to California. My grandfather owns a timeshare at the Desert Springs Marriott Resort in Palm Desert, and every year we go down to Palm Desert to spend a week with him. It’s nice, because it’s really the only vacation we get all year. I mean, we take little days off here and there; not often, because as some of you know, we work seven days a week and rest on the airplane. But our week in Palm Desert is a really nice get away.

The other nice part about Palm Desert is that Simeon goes golfing with my grandfather, which means I get some time alone. Being career dancers (and being married) means that not only do we live together, but we work in the same location, we share an office, we share a car, we share a phone, we practice, we train…. Those few hours that I get when Simeon is out playing golf with my grandfather is heaven to me. So I pack my leather-bound journal, in which I am writing a book that will probably never be published (it’s really for my own enjoyment, this one), and head off to the Starbucks café on El Paseo, the main shopping destination in Palm Desert.

a view from the outside of the cafe

This café is great. It was not terribly warm out, in fact definitely not warm enough for me, but nice enough for me to sit outside in the sun and enjoy my morning (others would call it afternoon) coffee. I don’t remember the workers, but they must have done a good job. I got what I ordered in a timely manner. I sat outside, basked in the sun, watched the expensive cars drive by and wish I had the funds to go shop at the nearby Gucci store. I love this location. It’s so relaxing, and so perfect for a desert location

San Jose Airport

Date: January 31, 2011

Drink: Grande Triple Skinny Vanilla Latte (it’s what I ordered, not what I got)

the SB stand at San Jose Airport

We were only home from England for two days before we had to take off to San Jose for the weekend. We have to do this every January, year after year, so don’t pity us. Travel is tough, but in this case, it’s extremely necessary.

Anyway, we got home from England very late on Tuesday night, and we taught a full schedule on Wednesday and Thursday, then hopped on the plane for the first flight out to San Jose on Friday morning. Of course, I grabbed a coffee at the Starbucks stand at SeaTac Airport, in the North Satellite, but I’ve already logged that location, which you can check out if you like here:

https://starbuckproject.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/seatac-airport-north-satellite-seattle-usa/

When we arrived in San Jose, Simeon ran off to rent the car while the students who flew down on our flight with us headed into baggage claim to fetch the bags. And there the Green Siren was waiting, at a very plasticky stand in the baggage claim. I couldn’t resist. I was exhausted, running on two hours of sleep.

So I ordered my individual drink of choice, which is really just a smaller version of the drink that Simeon and I like to share. When I got it, however, it was not what I ordered. I could have given it back; unfortunately, I was already out of the airport and waiting for the hotel shuttle with all of my luggage before I tasted my coffee and realized it was missing the vanilla syrup. Not very happy. Truly. How hard is it to hear “Vanilla Latte” and add vanilla syrup to the drink? But the two ladies behind the stand were more concerned in their own conversation than in making my drink.

That’s the way it goes…..

Heathrow Airport, Terminal 3, London

Date: January 25, 2011

Drink: Venti Quod Vanilla Latte

Food: Chocolate Chunk Chocolate Cookie 

Heathrow Airport, Terminal 3

This café is more like just a stand, which is unfortunate, because I think there is a Prezzo or something like that which is another café right next door, and they have a special seating area reserved just for their customers, even though it’s not even connected to the café. It’s just a boxed off area in the middle of the waiting lounge in Terminal 3. But anyway, we couldn’t sit there, and Starbucks doesn’t have any sitting area. So we went to the bar just across the waiting lounge and ordered some food and a couple of beers. Then after the quick meal, we headed over to Starbucks for our normal drink of choice before making our ways to our newly assigned gate. That was interesting, too. When we got to the gate, we had to open the cup so the lady checking our passports could see that we weren’t hiding anything inside the cup. Interesting, but not as interesting as the Starbucks at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, where the Air France attendant actually made me throw out my full cup of coffee because the customers are not allowed to have a cup of coffee with them during take-off. I haven’t run into that before or since.

Clapham High Street, Greater London, England

Date: 24th December, 2011

Drink: Quod Venti Vanilla Latte

There are no good Starbucks cafes in Dulwich. I’m serious. NONE. So in order to go to Starbucks if we get to Dulwich early, which happens often since we always give ourselves extra extra time to get through Streatham, we go to the Starbucks cafe in the Clapham High Street. It’s a great cafe, with a small outdoor area where we can enjoy the sun when IT’S NOT January. This is also a common sight to view a phenomenon I like to call “The Stroller Phenomenon”. I will write more on this in the future.

the cafe in the Clapham High Street