Sleepy in Seattle

It's been a very long day....

Our flight from Port Columbus (Ohio) left around 6:30 this morning.  It was running a bit late getting into Chicago and we literally ran to catch the connecting flight.  Naturally it was in a totally different concourse and had started boarding about 10 minutes before we even landed.  So...  we had to hustle our buns to make it.

But...  make it we did...  and we arrived in Seattle around 10am.  The 3 hour time difference made for a very long day.

We will be going on the Alaska cruise on Sunday so decided to come to Seattle a couple days early to do some sightseeing.  We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel...

Our first view of Seattle...  

That's the meter on the taxi racking up $$$ on the lower right.

We chose a hotel in the "touristy" section so we could walk...

The Moore Hotel is right next to the Moore Theater...

In fact, years ago it used to house theater people.

It is an old hotel...

When's the last time you saw a claw-foot bathtub in a hotel?

It kind of reminds me of hotels in Mexico...

Like hotels were in the USA 50 or more years ago...

But, the elevator works...

(we're on the 6th floor)

It actually has a lot of character...

And it's only a couple blocks from...

The Pike Place Market

This is a HUGE market!

Not just produce and fish, but they sell artwork, crafts, gorgeous flowers, souvenirs and more than we could possible see in just a few hours.

Street musicians play so there is constantly something going on.

Our daughter in Texas, was here just a few weeks ago and saw an item she wanted...

I can't remember if she bought it and it got lost on the way home or what...

But...

Celeste, we have those hair thingys you wanted.

The market goes on for several blocks

The buildings across from the market all have lovely flowers in boxes along the edges...

They make the whole area so colorful and festive.

Bill & I had lunch in one of the deli's...

It wasn't quite noon, but all the restaurants were packed!

We spent a lot of time just wandering around checking out the waterfront, the nearby parks, a few of the shops....

Even stopped and had a beer when our feet got too tired to go on.

We came back to our room for a brief rest, and headed back out around 4pm.

I wanted to find a geocache or two while here.

The first one we found after finally getting our GPS to settle down...

The 2nd one on my list was called 

Double Bubble Toil and Trouble!

The walls in this alley are TOTALLY covered with chewing gum!

No kidding!!!!

Somewhere in this gawd-awful mess there's a geocache hidden.

That's me in the lower left picture...

And you know what?

We didn't even touch this wall to start looking!

While it's pretty amazing just to look at it, I'll try my luck at any other cache before I'll touch this one.

We both wanted clam chowder for dinner but the Pike Place Chowder restaurant had closed at 5pm.

So we walked several blocks to a food court in a nearby mall where that restaurant has another place...

Bill, with his

Fish Taco and a cup of New England Clam Chowder...

We may not eat fancy, but we sure eat tasty!

Tomorrow we'll go to the Space Needle in the morning.

We are scheduled to visit Groundspeak in the afternoon.

Groundspeak is the headquarters for Geocaching.

The first geocache was hidden by a guy here in Seattle in 2001.  That hide began an international "game" that now has well over a million caches hidden, and I have no idea how many people like us go out and try to find.

So we'll have a couple of pretty busy days here before we board that cruise ship on Sunday.

Sometime we'll have to adjust to that 3 hour time difference.

That's All For Today!

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