Seattle

Days 18 to 20 (Sunday, July 4-Tuesday, July 6)

Our time in Seattle was well spent. It was very nice being back in a city after having spent a fairly long time in the wild. Seattle is much bigger than Minneapolis (about twice the size-both city proper and metro area). It has a big feel to it. We wound up spending five nights here (I had originally planned on 3-4 nights). As I mentioned, we stayed with a woman named Victoria (a divorced 54 year old lawyer). She was very quirky and nice. She had a great dog whose name was Prince- a huge mutt with some husky and German Sheppard in him.

On each of our first three days we took the water taxi across Elliot Bay from her home in West Seattle to downtown. We then spent our days doing the touristy stuff. We pretty much saw the entire downtown and most of its attractions. I get the sense that Seattle is a better place to live than visit. Most of the tourist attractions are fairly modest compared to other cities. It is a really nice city though. I would love to live there. The neighborhoods look really great. There are top notch restaurants, public art, hip denizens, etc. I can’t think of a single attraction that really felt like a homerun. The Space Needle was okay, a bit too crowded for my taste. Pike Place Market was overrun with people and was a real zoo. We took the underground tour, visiting the tunnels that run under the old part of town (when the original downtown was destroyed by a fire, they rebuilt the town 8-15 feet higher in an effort to improve the sewage system). Again, so-so. We did like the art museum, Smith Tower (which used to be the biggest office building outside of New York and was the tallest building west of the Mississippi for scores of years), and the new library. Mostly we just liked walking/riding around town.

Victoria drove us around town on two of the evenings of our stay. She drove fast and talked non-stop. She rolled through stop signs and red lights, cut across curbs, stopped the car in the middle of busy streets for photo ops, and fearlessly flagged down pale, pierced pedestrians to ask questions. I’m not sure if the kids were thrilled or terrified. At one point, attempting to give credence to her claim that she was absent minded; she mentioned that she had lost her driver’s license. I can believe it. Either in the “Oh dear, I’ve misplaced it” sense or in the “Ma'am, that’s your 15^th moving violation this evening” one.

My favorite part about Seattle was the neighborhoods. Each one looked immensely livable and distinct. I liked the looks of them and the people in them. The Freemont, West Seattle, and Capitol Hill areas looked especially nice but that’s leaving out a number of other nice ones. We loved seeing the statue of Lenin and the feared 18-foot high Freemont Troll housed under a bridge.

Seattle also has a free transit zone in the downtown area, which makes sightseeing there very fun. I love the idea of randomly hopping on buses and trying to figure out exactly where they are going later. The one downside about the city is the pan handling. It was very prevalent and fairly aggressive. At first, I was nonplussed by it (albeit saddened) but after a while it became very depressing and annoying.

Our last day in Seattle was very mellow. We drove out to the Ballard neighborhood to see the salmon ladder and lock system. We had lunch in a yummy local eatery (Indian this time) and then headed to the beach for a while. We needed another dose of insane driving and touring so we took Victoria out to dinner to celebrate our last night. It did not disappoint. All in all, Seattle was a fun stop.