we did it! we did it!

We climbed all 69 flights of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's 21st Annual Big Climb! If we’re being honest here, some of the best moments had to be the escalator ride up to the fifth floor, which was the actual starting point. And the elevator rides down, those were pretty great too. But the climbing in the middle wasn’t really that bad. We just took it at a nice, slow pace. Or I should say I took it at a nice, slow pace. Matt was climbing behind me, so he didn’t really have a choice.

Here we are at the observation deck near the top of the Columbia Center. Officially the building has 76 stories of office space above ground, but we only climb 69 flights. Escalators cover three lower flights (which are between the street level of 5th Street and 4th street, so the stair wells dump you out at the higher elevation of 5th Street) and a private club on the top two floors is off-limits. So our final view was from the 73rd floor observation deck.


Please excuse the horrible lighting - we were using the camera on my treo, which has no flash, so as not to have to haul an extra camera up with us. Not that my little digital camera weighs that much, but I'm sure somewhere around the 50th flight I would have hated myself for bringing it.

If you look carefully over Matt's shoulder you can see Seattle's famous Space Needle. Our altitude has us 400 feet higher than the Needle's observation deck. You can't see it in the picture, but we really are smiling. We're tired, but smiling.

In this picture we're smiling even bigger, because it's before we climbed.


I'll be adding more to this post soon, but right now I'm very tired and need to get to sleep. Thanks for checking out my post, and be sure to visit our fundraising page to see how we're doing. We're happy to take more donations at any time until our cut off on April 6th.
http://www.active.com/donate/2007bigclimb/titelbaum