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This is the Real First Day of our vacation because it is Friday and we usually start our vacations on Fridays. Our grand plan for our last day in Seattle is to take a boat ride through the locks and do some souvenir buying. Once more we do the coffee-brewing dance, making one cup at a time. Since we failed to pick up any bakery goodies yesterday, we have nothing left to munch while we read our USA Today. Staying in a hotel room is a lot different than staying in a timeshare. For one thing, you can’t bring any real food with you. Unless you stay in one of those motel rooms with the little microwave and the little refrigerator and a coffee maker that makes 2 cups at a time. We stayed in a Homewood Suites recently and WOW, let me tell ya, that was pretty darn nice for a motel room. It had a kitchen that was bigger than the one at Hyatt Pinion Point (a pitiful excuse for a kitchen there in my opinion) and a good-sized living room and a separate bedroom with a king size bed. It wasn’t a Heavenly bed, mind you, cause I think Homewood Suites is a Hilton outfit and that Heavenly bed deal is a Westin thing. Still, it was a pretty darn comfortable bed & it only cost something like $79 a night. Did you know that Motel 6 is called Motel 6 because it used to cost $6 a night? Of course, minimum wage back then was like $1.10 an hour. Our room at the Westin is pretty snazzy. I’m pretty sure we got an upgrade when I checked in & flashed my Starwood Preferred Guest card because it looks just like the picture of the deluxe room on the website. But there isn’t any little microwave or little bar size refrigerator and the “one cup at a time” coffee maker is a pain in the butt. Even our cheapo Park ‘N Fly motel in Sacramento has a 2-cup coffee maker.
So anyway, we’re hungry and we figure we’ll just get some breakfast at the hotel restaurant before we head out to catch the FREE bus. Big Mistake. The breakfast buffet doesn’t look very exciting so we order from the menu. Blah food, surly waiter, overpriced. We make a note to pass on this one next time.
By now it’s getting late enough for the shops to be opening so we mosey off to our bus stop & catch our FREE ride to Pioneer Square. We want to check out some of the shops & spots we saw on our walking tour yesterday. We take some photos of the interesting buildings.
This is a parking garage that everyone calls the Sinking Ship. Mr. Ranger told us that all the locals hate it. A beautiful old historic hotel used to stand on this site but it was torn down to build this parking garage. Seattleites (Seattlonians? Seattlers?) are outraged and that’s what sparked the effort to preserve & restore this section of town. It had gotten pretty seedy and rundown. Actually, it was always a pretty seedy part of Seattle, what with all the saloons & brothels & what not but nonetheless it was pretty historic and needed to be preserved. So now it is called Pioneer Square and it has become a high rent district.
There’s an underground tour you can take here. Awhile back, they cut off the top of one of the hills and hauled tons & tons of dirt to raise the street level so the streets wouldn’t flood at high tide all the time. There are a whole bunch of walkways & cafes below street level. Our friends who have taken the underground tour told us it was pretty lame & that the part above ground was much better so we skipped it. Our FREE tour yesterday was really great. We discovered some beautiful little nooks & crannies. This is a hidden little park.
The old buildings are very interesting. Most are in the process of being restored. The building owners often build fabulous penthouse apartments on the roofs but you can only see them from above since one of the building code stipulations is that they are not visible from street level.
This is one of those triangle shaped buildings near our hotel.
Whenever we travel, we look for bookstores. Some of our favorite souvenirs are books about the places we have visited. We found a fantastic bookstore in Pioneer Square, one of the best we have ever found. It is Elliott Bay Books. They have a really interesting website, too. Elliott Bay Book Co. We spent a lot of time in there & left plenty of our tourist dollars.
We decide to head back to the Public Market to do some more souvenir shopping and grab a glass of something cool & refreshing. We head to the bus stop to catch our FREE ride. When the bus arrives, we find that it is really, really full with standing room only. Then, an older fellow, using one of those motorized scooter things comes on board. You know those things I mean. At places like Disneyworld there are millions of them. I’m sure they are wonderful for the people who have disabilities that make it impossible to walk. Anyway, this fellow using the motorized dealie joins our crowded bus. He isn’t very adept at maneuvering the thing so it takes a long time to get him settled & strapped in. We dropped off several passengers along the way. We didn’t just open the door and drop them on the pavement. The bus actually stopped first. When we reached our destination almost everyone on the bus got off. We headed off in search of the booth with the dog & cat & fish pins. In the spot from the other day we found an empty booth. We searched some more & finally found it in a different location. I bought a cat for me and one for Dear Mom, too. Isn’t it cute?
We have booked an Argosy tour of the locks at 1:30pm so we head toward the dock. We are early so we kill some time by checking out Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop online It’s crammed with other tourists just like us. We decide our time would be better spent having a beer. There’s a decent outdoor café called Steamer’s a few steps away so we grab a table, order 3 beers and await our tour. We really enjoyed this tour. For $36 each we were bused to Lake Union where we boarded our boat for a 2 hour narrated ride through the Hiram Chittenden Locks to arrive back at pier 56. We sat up front and it was a beautiful day.
This is the view coming back to the pier.
We recommend this tour to everyone. Unfortunately, this was as close as we got to the Troll.
We hiked one more time uphill to our downtown hotel room and did a little packing up for our departure in the morning. Our dinner choice was Anthony’s on the waterfront. We had no reservation but were seated with no wait and enjoyed our shrimp gumbo & Crab salads washed down with nice Washington wines. We were sad to take our last hike back downtown. We have had so much fun exploring a tiny part of Seattle. Next time we will be more adventuresome and take the bus outside the free zone. We have to come back to see the troll under the bridge. We snuggled into our Heavenly beds and immediately fell asleep. We are headed for a foreign land in the morning.
Next up is Day 4: Cruising to Canada
So anyway, we’re hungry and we figure we’ll just get some breakfast at the hotel restaurant before we head out to catch the FREE bus. Big Mistake. The breakfast buffet doesn’t look very exciting so we order from the menu. Blah food, surly waiter, overpriced. We make a note to pass on this one next time.
By now it’s getting late enough for the shops to be opening so we mosey off to our bus stop & catch our FREE ride to Pioneer Square. We want to check out some of the shops & spots we saw on our walking tour yesterday. We take some photos of the interesting buildings.
This is a parking garage that everyone calls the Sinking Ship. Mr. Ranger told us that all the locals hate it. A beautiful old historic hotel used to stand on this site but it was torn down to build this parking garage. Seattleites (Seattlonians? Seattlers?) are outraged and that’s what sparked the effort to preserve & restore this section of town. It had gotten pretty seedy and rundown. Actually, it was always a pretty seedy part of Seattle, what with all the saloons & brothels & what not but nonetheless it was pretty historic and needed to be preserved. So now it is called Pioneer Square and it has become a high rent district.
There’s an underground tour you can take here. Awhile back, they cut off the top of one of the hills and hauled tons & tons of dirt to raise the street level so the streets wouldn’t flood at high tide all the time. There are a whole bunch of walkways & cafes below street level. Our friends who have taken the underground tour told us it was pretty lame & that the part above ground was much better so we skipped it. Our FREE tour yesterday was really great. We discovered some beautiful little nooks & crannies. This is a hidden little park.
The old buildings are very interesting. Most are in the process of being restored. The building owners often build fabulous penthouse apartments on the roofs but you can only see them from above since one of the building code stipulations is that they are not visible from street level.
This is one of those triangle shaped buildings near our hotel.
Whenever we travel, we look for bookstores. Some of our favorite souvenirs are books about the places we have visited. We found a fantastic bookstore in Pioneer Square, one of the best we have ever found. It is Elliott Bay Books. They have a really interesting website, too. Elliott Bay Book Co. We spent a lot of time in there & left plenty of our tourist dollars.
We decide to head back to the Public Market to do some more souvenir shopping and grab a glass of something cool & refreshing. We head to the bus stop to catch our FREE ride. When the bus arrives, we find that it is really, really full with standing room only. Then, an older fellow, using one of those motorized scooter things comes on board. You know those things I mean. At places like Disneyworld there are millions of them. I’m sure they are wonderful for the people who have disabilities that make it impossible to walk. Anyway, this fellow using the motorized dealie joins our crowded bus. He isn’t very adept at maneuvering the thing so it takes a long time to get him settled & strapped in. We dropped off several passengers along the way. We didn’t just open the door and drop them on the pavement. The bus actually stopped first. When we reached our destination almost everyone on the bus got off. We headed off in search of the booth with the dog & cat & fish pins. In the spot from the other day we found an empty booth. We searched some more & finally found it in a different location. I bought a cat for me and one for Dear Mom, too. Isn’t it cute?
We have booked an Argosy tour of the locks at 1:30pm so we head toward the dock. We are early so we kill some time by checking out Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop online It’s crammed with other tourists just like us. We decide our time would be better spent having a beer. There’s a decent outdoor café called Steamer’s a few steps away so we grab a table, order 3 beers and await our tour. We really enjoyed this tour. For $36 each we were bused to Lake Union where we boarded our boat for a 2 hour narrated ride through the Hiram Chittenden Locks to arrive back at pier 56. We sat up front and it was a beautiful day.
This is the view coming back to the pier.
We recommend this tour to everyone. Unfortunately, this was as close as we got to the Troll.
We hiked one more time uphill to our downtown hotel room and did a little packing up for our departure in the morning. Our dinner choice was Anthony’s on the waterfront. We had no reservation but were seated with no wait and enjoyed our shrimp gumbo & Crab salads washed down with nice Washington wines. We were sad to take our last hike back downtown. We have had so much fun exploring a tiny part of Seattle. Next time we will be more adventuresome and take the bus outside the free zone. We have to come back to see the troll under the bridge. We snuggled into our Heavenly beds and immediately fell asleep. We are headed for a foreign land in the morning.
Next up is Day 4: Cruising to Canada
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