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| Breakfast view |
Today was book-ended by two meals with a fine view of the water.
Despite both of us being woken briefly by a snoring serenade from the gentleman in the next room, we slept surprisingly well and woke refreshed and ready for a busy day of sightseeing. It was back to the Pike Place Market for a classic American breakfast of eggs (over-easy) and bacon fried to a crisp followed by toast and grape jelly. We ate at Lowells Seafood, which sits high above water with three floors of lovely views.
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| Waterfront Pier |
After brekky there was time for us to take the elevator down to the waterfront to check out a few of the many piers that line the sound before we had to meet up with our tour guide.. Some of these are “working” piers where the huge ferries depart every half an hour, one houses the Seattle Aquarium and others have been developed as pretty waterside shopping and dining precincts.
Back up in the Market we met Ruth and Mac from St Louis, Missouri who were also waiting for the Shutter Tours mini bus. We didn’t have to wait long before Terry, our guide, collected us and whipped us out of the city to our first stop of the say, Snoqualmie Falls State Park. The drive out of Seattle took us across lovely lakes and past some pretty suburbs looking cool and green in their forest setting. Terry pointed out where Bill Gates lives and regaled us with stories of the other tech and business giants that made their start in Seattle, like Amazon.com. He also discussed the reputation Seattle has for being a rainy city and admitted that it was well-earned. Last year, during the wet months from October to March, they had a stretch of over 90 days of rain!
The Sonqualmie falls are taller than Niagara falls but certainly don’t have the same volume of water going over them. They’re pretty though and the Lodge that perches above it looks like it would be a lovely spot to stay. The Tour is promoted as a sightseeing tour for photographers and Terry gave us some interesting tips and advice at each stop on how to capture the best angle etc.
From the Falls we headed back into town to see the Fremont Troll, who just happens to live under a bridge…. seriously! Well, yes, he’s made of concrete but he’s very life-like 🙂 Fremont is an inner-city suburb that attracted a lively artistic community for many years and has a funky, hipster feel to it. They have a number of wonderful artistic installations and host the Fremont Solstice Parade every year, the highlight of which is the great naked bike ride! Last year 1500 people got their gear of and dressed up in body paint to ride through the suburb and down to Pike Place Market to give the tourists something to remember Seattle by!
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| The Fremont Troll … keeping a close eye on Neil. |
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| Wild Salmon at Ballard Locks |
From the Troll we drove past the 15 foot tall statue of Lenin ( brought to Fremont from Slovakia after the 1989 Revolution) and o the the Ballard Locks where boats make the switch from the fresh waters of Lake Union down to the salt waters of Puget Sound. The particularly interesting thing for us was the salmon ladder that’s been built here to allow wild salmon to return back upstream to their spawning grounds. From above we saw hundreds of them queued up waiting to get into the ladder and then climbed down into the observation chamber where we could watch them through heavy glass windows as they swam upstream. There was also a lone seal keeping an eye on them, looking for an easy lunch I suspect!
The final stop of the day was Kerry Park which sits in a wealthy, leafy suburb high on a hill overlooking downtown. Terry was amazing the Americans on the bus with tales of how expensive the houses were but coming from the Sydney property market we considered them to be very reasonably priced. We could sell our home and buy a lovely property with water views within 10 minutes drive of downtown… and have a little change left over. However, I could only bear to live in Seattle for half the year… the dry half! The Kerry park stop was to take advantage of the ovely views of the skyline of Seattle with Mount Rainier peeking out of the clouds behind the city
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| You can *just* see mount rainier peeking up out of low cloud at the right. It’s capped by a puff of white cloud that Terry said was a sure sign of rain coming |
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| Our Free touristy shot, taken by the bored attendants at the Space Needle. I wish we’d seen the mountain like this! |
The tour ended back at the Market where Neil and I grabbed a quick lunch of seeringly spicy sausage hot dogs before we headed backuptown for a brief stop in at our hotel. Next stop was the ride on the Seattle Monorail up to the Seattle Centre to see the Space Needle. The Seattle Centre , Space Needle and Monorail were all built for the 1962 World Fair and remain today as one of the city’s primary tourist attractions. There are a number of museums and playgrounds and theatre complexes here but the Space Needle is the prime attraction.
We bought our tickets and wandered around the pretty gardens while we waited for our entrance time. The sculptures and artworks scattered throughout the park were fabulous but my favourite was the “Sonic Bloom” – an installation of huge glass flowers and a sounds system that makes strange booming sounds when anyone walks past them. It scared the bejeezes out of me the first time it boomed at me … but I loved it! In the video below you can see Neil jump when it booms at him. ( Or click here to see it)
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| View from the top |
At 4pm we joined the queue for the ride up the exterior elevator to the top of the tower. From the top we had a 360 degree view for miles around and fortunately Neil was too busy taking photos to be to disturbed by the heights. We collected our free photo and rode back down to town on the 2 minute monorail ride for a bit of R and R in the hotel.
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| Dinner View |
We’d decided we couldn’t leaving Seattle without eating seafood so we walked back down to the waterfront for dinner at “Ivar’s Acres of Clams”, a long term Seattle icon.
The view from the table was the evening compliment to our breakfast view but the sunset that arrived with our main courses was the winner for the day. It was a great way to finish our time in this town that has such a strong connection to it’s seafaring past.
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| Sunset over the Sound. |