KerryAndGabe.com

We had planned a full day for the 2nd day in Seattle since we knew this was the only full day that we would have to tour the city. We got an early start since we had gone to bed so early the previous night. I woke up around 5:30am and was unable to go back to sleep, so I finished the book that I was reading (Twilight by Stephanie Meyer).

We started our day with what seemed like a fairly long walk to Crave, a breakfast restaurant that I had found through recommendations. I had scoped out several places for our visit in Seattle, and I printed up a document complete with walking directions from our hotel and such. The walk was mostly uphill which made it seem even longer. We even checked a map about three-quarters the way through our walk to ensure that we were still on the right path.

We finally found the place, and they were having “technical difficulties.” They weren’t quite open yet as one of their servers (or maybe two?) decided not to show up that morning. They also had no idea how to start the coffee machine. We didn’t really care, but can you imagine it? No coffee in Seattle! We waited until they were ready to serve us. I ordered “Apple Dutch Babies” – partly because it sounded funny to me and partly because it sounded tasty. It was quite tasty! Gabe enjoyed his egg sandwich something or another as well.

Here you can see that Crave is in in the middle of nowhere:

After our tasty breakfast, we headed back towards the area of our hotel where we planned to catch the monorail to the Seattle Center area. We stopped at a Barnes & Noble since we were running out of books and thought we might get a chance to read on the cruise or at least on the plane ride home. I picked up the rest of the Twilight series (New Moon and Eclipse). Gabe decided he could start the Twilight series if he finished his other book. We dropped the books off at our hotel and then caught the monorail over to the Seattle Center.

We did the obligatory Seattle experience and went up into the Space Needle. The view was nice, I suppose, but it was a bit hazy and the photos didn’t come out all that well. Every time I do the “top of a tall building” thing in a big city, it just doesn’t seem to be all that exciting when it is all said and done. But hey, we did it, and now we can…well, say that we did it. When we purchased our ticket, we paid a few bucks extra to get the “Night and Day” pass…but we ended up only going up to the observation deck once. We just didn’t feel it was worth it to go up for a second look, even if it would be a bit different at night.

The Space Needle, monorail track, and the part of the oddball EMP/SFM building:

Next we headed over to the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum (EMP/SFM). Both museums are included with one admission price. The museums were both pretty neat. In the EMP, we watched some Jimi Hendrix footage, looked at a bunch of guitars throughout the years, listened to various song clips and interviews about the songs, learned how to play piano and guitar in the interactive section, watched some interviews about famous musicians, and browsed the Disney music exhibit. We saw a bunch of costumes and memorabilia in the SFM. Gabe particularly enjoyed the costumes and props from the movies.

After the museum, we strolled around the Seattle Center area and decided to see the Mt. Saint Helens IMAX movie at the Pacific Science Center. Since admission to the museum was only a few bucks more, we also toured the museum. Once we were inside the museum, I remembered visiting as a kid with my family. The museum is fairly rundown. It used to be a pretty nice museum, back in the day, but it is in need of some serious updating. The IMAX theatre was also pretty disappointing. It must have been one of the first IMAX theatres, and it has not seen any updates since then. The screen was probably smaller than some of the normal movie theatre screens these days. I enjoyed seeing the Mount St. Helens film since I remembered visiting the site with my family in the late 80s. The film was interesting to me, but it was also created around the late 80s…so again, not quite up-to-date. Overall, I’m not sure that we can recommend the Pacific Science Center unless it goes through some serious renovations.

We didn’t do very much for the rest of the day. We found a random overpriced Italian place to have dinner. By the end of the day, we had pretty much experienced all of Seattle that we cared to experience (with the exception of our plans to go to Pike Place Market the following morning). Neither of us were all that impressed with what Seattle had to offer and were looking forward to getting on our ship!

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Posted by kerry on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 5:03pm.
Categories: life.