More of Seattle

It didn't seem to take us long to adjust to the 3 hour time change, but, truth is, I think it takes a lot longer for me when I lose hours than when I gain them.  Guess that doesn't say much about how I really use my time, does it?

Bill & I walked a few blocks to a great breakfast cafe around 7:00 this morning.  Neither of us are coffee drinkers, but we both had a cup of decaf.  When in Seattle, you see coffee shops EVERYWHERE!  You smell the aroma of various blends along every street.  About half the people you see walking are carrying a cup of some kind of coffee.  Not only Starbucks, but more brands of coffee than I've ever heard of.

It's sort of like being in a foreign land and learning all those new species of birds....

I didn't take any breakfast photos, but I will say that the dungeness crab omelet was fantastic!

We headed over to the monorail around 9am.  Wanted to go up in the Space Needle.

This is the fastest way to travel between downtown and the Seattle Center

You can see the Space Needle in the center.

It was built for the 1962 World's Fair.

This year it is celebrating it's 50th year.

The views of the city and of Puget Sound are great!

Visibility was quite good today, but not so good that we

could see Mt Rainier.

My favorite views were not of the far-off places,

But of

The Dale Chihuly Glass Garden

Having seen his glass exhibits a couple of times before with my sister, Cynthia, at the Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio,

I recognized his work even before I saw the massive

glass sculptures.

And looking down onto another building I saw...

These huge spiders.

(Actually, they look more like Daddy-Longlegs, don't they?)

We walked through much of the Seattle Center grounds...

These Straw Gardens were quite interesting....

I'll have to admit that having seen similar straw "logs" holding back water or stuff along highway road jobs, I kind of got a chuckle out of using them for "art".

There are several museums in this area, and lots of other uses of the grounds....

I wish I'd had Bill stand beside this giant shrimp

(hey... is that an oxymoron?)

just to show you how big it is...

Well, I didn't...  but it is huge.  I think that's a bicycle wheel at the top of one of it's feelers.

While we were taking a break, we saw this tour go by...

Segway tours are a lot of fun.

We've done a couple of these in other places and they are a great way to cover a lot of ground and still see things close up.

There are totem poles around in some of the parks...

I was disappointed to see that this one really wasn't carved.

Not only that, there wasn't any back to it.

Oh well...  that's what I get for being a purist...

Living in a small motorhome doesn't give me a lot of room for "excess baggage"

But my collection of Smashed Pennies doesn't take up much room.  Of course I had to have one of the Space Needle.

We took the monorail back to the downtown area, 

then headed off later to Groundspeak

The Home of Geocaching!

While they don't give tours since it is a working office, the reception area is where the Lily Pad is...

That's a huge box that holds lots and lots of Travelbugs and other tradeables.

These folks are sorting through to see what they want to take and hide somewhere else.

I won't go into geocaching in this blog, but it's an international "treasure hunt" kind of game.

Groundspeak is the headquarters of it all.

Here I am...

Signing the logbook that we, the RVers, have visited here.

We took the bus back to the downtown area, but not before stopping at a wonderful Greek restaurant...

This baklava was like no other I've ever tasted...

Really delicious!

Tomorrow we have to check out of this hotel by 11am.

We'll head over to the hotel at the airport where we'll meet up with the Wholly Genes genealogy group.

That's the software company that Bill uses to record his genealogy records.  

They "sponsor" a week-long cruise each year.

I'll write more about it later, but that's why we're here.

And here you thought we were just in Seattle to sightsee and have fun!

By the way...  the weather is fantastic!

That's All For Today!