Kenmore Car Service

Where the Runway Is Water

Kenmore Air Harbor has launched flights from this shoreline since 1946. Five lakeside acres, the Burke-Gilman Trail along one edge, and boarding straight onto the water for the San Juan Islands and beyond.

What catches first-time passengers out is that none of it looks like an airport. There is no departures hall, no concourse, and nothing on the road that says airport.

So we treat it as its own procedure rather than an airport run. You get the exact door in writing, and we allow for a floatplane that will not hold for a late arrival.

Not every departure here is scheduled either. Charters leave for private beaches and waterfront lodges, and those parties tend to arrive as one group rather than trickling in.

Our First Class SUV is what we send here. It seats five, fits a weekend’s worth of bags, and puts you down within sight of the water rather than across a car park.

A Seminary in the Trees, and the Drive Out at Eleven

Guests at The Lodge at St. Edward State Park, a former seminary, underestimate the exit rather than the arrival. Park roads are wooded and unlit, and a phone map is less help under that canopy than people expect.

Rooms sit directly above the ballroom, so a wedding here splits in two. Half your guests walk upstairs afterward. The other half want a way home at 11:00 p.m., out of a forest, in the dark.

That second half is ours. Wedding parties booking this venue settle the return leg early, and we would rather you did. It is one name on a wider list of Eastside venues.

A weekend here is rarely one event either:

• Friday rehearsal dinner, smaller and earlier, usually just family.
• Saturday reception, the full 120, arriving inside one narrow window.
• Sunday brunch, when guests leave in twos and threes across three hours.

Corporate bookings reverse that. Retreats take the same rooms, but delegates trickle in from Sea-Tac across an afternoon and leave together on one bus.

Our Ford E-450 Shuttle Bus fits both patterns. Two runs clear a full reception, so everyone leaves from the same door, and nobody waits in the cold.

Three Brewpubs, One Street, Nowhere to Park

Locals call the strip of taprooms and distilleries along the Burke-Gilman Trail Brew Row. The addresses run along NE 175th Street, but the trail is what joins them. Stops sit within a walk of each other.

What we notice is that groups book it the wrong way round, asking to be moved between stops two minutes apart on foot. What the street actually calls for:

• Collecting at the end rather than shuttling between stops, whenever the end turns out to be.
• A vehicle that waits nearby instead of circling, which our Ford Transit Van does with fourteen seats and one run home.
• Tastings that finish when they finish, since nothing on this row runs to a booked hour.
• Reservations made by the hour, which is the flexibility groups came for in the first place.
• Extra notice in September, when an Oktoberfest runs across downtown and this street, filling our calendar earlier than any other weekend here.

Weekdays Look Nothing Like Weekends

Bastyr University holds a wooded campus off the main road, and most people arriving for it flew in that week. Open days, graduations, and conference sessions all start at a fixed hour. None of them wait.

The worry we hear is always the same. Nobody flies in to arrive after a ceremony has already started. So those campus arrivals are settled weeks out, with the meeting point agreed in writing rather than on the morning.

The city empties outward too, and rarely for one errand. People go down the lake to Kirkland for dinner on the water, or east to Woodinville for an afternoon in the tasting rooms. Others leave at dawn for an early flight. We hold the way back on most of those, because nobody wants to be solving that at the end of the night.