Slightly Sunny Seattle

Update: Added photos! There are more on Flickr if you are interested.
We arrived in Seattle on Thursday night and immediately went to bed. It was a good thing too, because yesterday we wore ourselves out! It was clear in the morning, and even a little sunny, so we took the opportunity and David, Jose and I headed to the Space Needle after riding the train up from Auburn with Katie and seeing her office. We met a couple of her coworkers who were nice; one guy is some kind of bus prodigy who knew all the bus routes in King County by the time he was 9 years old. He is definitely passionate about his job! (Katie works for the King County transit department.)

We got to the Space Needle right around 9:00 in the morning, which was nice because there weren’t many people there yet. The view was great, as expected — it wasn’t clear enough to see all the way to Mt. Rainier, but we could see all of Seattle and the Puget Sound and the islands across the way. They also had some surprisingly good quality telescopes on top, and we had a lot of fun looking at the boats and ferries and spying on people walking down the street. The side facing the city was very, very windy and cold, but the side facing Lake Union and the university was calmer. After taking photos of the city, we had to warm up inside with coffee.

Our plan was to head from the Space Needle down to the Seattle Aquarium, but while searching for the bus stop we noticed the Science Fiction Museum that was right next door to the Space Needle. It looked pretty cool from the outside, so we decided to buy tickets and ended up spending the next 2+ hours there! They had a pretty amazing collection of everything from first editions of famous sci-fi books by Asimov and Heinlein to movie props from films like Alien to costumes from TV shows like Star Trek. It was really pretty cool, and I think David and Jose liked it even more than I did (they are bigger sci-fi fans). The entire museum was created/funded by Paul Allen, and a lot of the items on display said “From the Paul Allen Family Collection.” Must be nice to be rich and able to buy whatever you want!
The museum didn’t allow photos, but I did take one in the lobby of the sign for the women’s bathroom, since it made me laugh. I also liked the architecture of the building (which is shared with the Experience Music Project that we didn’t have time to see). It’s so obviously Gehry.

Katie took the afternoon off, so she met us at Seattle Center and we headed back to Pike Place Market where we had lunch overlooking the sound and then wandered around the market for a while. Of course we saw the first Starbucks, and I think we tasted everything that was offered as a sample — chocolate, jelly, honey, vinegar, all sorts of food items. We bought the yummiest things — peppermint chocolate sauce and a honeycrisp apple. Man that is a good apple! (Though I’m not sure it was actually a Washington apple; who knows.) Monday Night Football is here this week, and we saw a few of the Seahawks players at the fish market — they were being videotaped catching fish for a segment for the football broadcast. That was pretty cool, though Katie said none of them were the big stars of the football team. Oh well.

From the market we planned to catch the bus to Bellevue to meet Joel at his parents’ house for dinner, but Katie (the bus transportation employee) didn’t know where the bus stopped! Well, she knew one place where it stopped, down by the train station next to the football stadium and her office building, so we started walking there. Two miles later, we made it. I teased Katie a lot about the death march she took us on, because I was already tired from walking around all day. But it wasn’t too bad, really. And we worked off all the calories from all the free samples at the market!
We had pizza and played pool and cards at Joel’s parents house and after that we were pooped! I fell asleep in the car as we drove back to Auburn. It was a very busy day, and the next few will be just as fun!