The town where you can't buy underpants

I remember that the Wikipedia entry for Redmond notes that it used to be known as the town where one can't buy underpants. Redmond has traditionally had so little retail development that up until the fairly recent construction of the Redmond Town Center, it really was true.

Redmond's neighbor to the south, Bellevue, should be called the town where you can't buy gas.

The story goes like this: I went to drop off my rental car a few hours ago. Thankfully, I didn't have to go all the way to SeaTac (where I picked it up) to do so—there's a small rental location in Bellevue. It took me around 25 minutes to get down there, but only because there was pretty heavy afternoon traffic on the 405. Usually it's a 10-minute drive.

When I got there, though, I realized that the car was nearly empty. Now, it's a corporate rental and really, I'm sure it doesn't matter all that much. However, Microsoft does request that I fill it up at the end, and my last rental (in January) was returned running on fumes because I gawked at the Museum of Flight for a few hours and nearly missed my flight.

So I figured I'd throw gas in this one. The thing is that I couldn't find a gas station anywhere in downtown Bellevue. Anywhere. 45 minutes of driving in circles yielded me nothing. And by this point, I was so determined to actually find a damned gas station that the fact that I could have dropped the car off empty didn't even occur to me. At that point, I was a man on a mission. A gassy mission.

The only realy course of action I had left was to drive straight out from the city center and hope that I found something in the suburbs. It took a good ten minutes of driving, but I finally found a ramshackle station which actually had full service. Not that I used it.

It turns out that the station that I found was almost halfway back to Kirkland. Hilarity!