Packing a lot of Seattle into one day

We began our one-day whirlwind tour of Seattle with breakfast at Glo's, a wonderful local cafe filled with a very hipster crowd. clearly the hoodie is the official uniform of Seattle. We shared a delicious omelet and Belgian waffle and plotted out our day.

First stop, the original and immense REI which appears to have everything including a 65-foot indoor climbing wall and tracks to try out your mountain bike or new hiking boots. Barney got a combo monopod-trekking pole for taking photos, and then we took the bus down to Pike Place.

Pike Place is a bit like Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, but with more fish and about the same number of tourists. We gawked at the enormous king crabs and lobsters a bit, ran into someone I know from the Humanities West board also on holiday, and worked our way down toward the water away from the shops. After a brisk walk along the waterfront we found a nice pier to eat our picnic lunch we'd brought, and watch the boats and ferries go by.

Going for the trifecta of tourism, we walked up to Westlake to the transit center to ride on the Monorail, for the 7 minutes it take to get to the Seattle Center. Wondrous as it was when new - Barney came up here in 1962 for the World's Fair and rode it then - it was pleasant but not extraordinary.

We walked to the EMP museum,  the beautiful undulations of metal glistening in the sun, and ENT inside, looking for the Jimi Hendrix exhibits - he was the inspiration for the museum, but the galleries about him were being renovated. So we toured an exhibit on the evolution of the electric guitar, where I finally leaned what a "pickup" actually is. Apparently early electric guitars were considered so similar to telephones that it was hard to get patents on them. In another area you could go into a tiny practice room outfitted with electric guitars, electric bass, drum, miss and keyboards, and have a little fantasy moment of what it would be like to play in a rock band.

On to cocktails! We went to Mistral Kitchen, a bit set of downtown,which has been recommended to us by Paul's stepfather Peter, who travels to Seattle often. The drinks were delightful - mine was called "Courting Rachel" and involved a cool little device which turns square ice into a perfect sphere and hickory-smoked bourbon which they did in front of us with a creme brûlée torch and a rubber tube to infuse the bourbon in a glass container. It was quite a show, and delicious. And the wall behind the bar was a wonderful collage of bottle openers.

Seattle is clearly undergoing a gigantic building boom, with new buidlngs gong up everywere.
More walking to another recommendation of Peter's, a fantastic sushi place called Shiro's. I don't think I've ever had such incredible sushi outside of Japan. The king crab with ponzu sauce was wonderful, but utterly incredible were the smoked mackerel and the sockeye salmon. The smoked mackerel had a deeply smoky flavor, and the salmon was butterfly and melted in your mouth. We also had some tempura, very light so you mostly tasted the item inside the coating rather than the coating. All told, a wonderful sushi experience.

Walking a few blocks more we went to the Chihuly garden, which had a spectacular collection of his work both indoors and out. It struck me that the glass looks so beautiful in an outdoor setting, where it seems like a natural part of the plants and shrubs. As we were outside, a man got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend, and everyone cheered! We offered to take a photo of them, they looked so happy.

Out last stop was the Space Needle, just next to the Chihuly Garden. The elevator whisked us up to the top, after a short stop to get more passengers from what looked like a graduation dance on a lower floor. On this clear might Seattle sparkled below us, and we enjoyed picking out the landmarks of where we'd been during the day. While w know e only barely scratched the surface of Seattle, we really enjoyed the day, and after one last bus ride back to Capital Hill, we headed off to bed, to get ready for our departure to Alaska tomorrow.