Sleepless in Seattle

September 18, 2008
Today we decided to go back to Seattle and take the Monorail from the Space Needle down to the Public Market on the coast of Puget Sound and tour the city in one of the “Ducks”, amphibian vehicles from WWII that take you through the city and into the Sound. The Space Needle is ground zero for tourists. It is located in the Seattle Center, a 30 odd acre park that has, along with the Space Needle, the Sci-Fi Museum, The Rock Museum that is supposedly in the shape of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. He was from Seattle and bought his first guitar there. We traveled to the Westpark area, which is so much like the shopping district of San Francisco with Nordstrom, originated here in the early 1900s, Macys, and many tony clothing and shoe shops that we just knew were too pricey for our budget. The people we encountered in this area were (pardon the expression) high dollar grunge. The average age here is 34 and the number one profession is attorney-at-law. So we were passing these professional people during their lunch break who sported denim and leather but with a grunge look. We are both people watchers and we certainly got our fix for a couple weeks! So then we make our way from 5th Avenue down to the Public Market at the wharf. They have the best produce from local growers there on 3 levels! Also meats and the famous Pike Place Fish Market where the “Fish” series of motivational materials was filmed and presented at Alston & Bird a few years ago. We saw Brussels sprouts the size of baseballs and white corn on the cob the size of rolling pins. I mean everything was beautiful and bigger than what we are accustomed to. We had a head’s up from Linda and Dana to check out Ivar’s clam chowder, but we had walked 10 blocks and settled for Pike Place Chowder which was very tasty and served with sourdough bread. There were several street performers included one dude with a piano on wheels! Our entertainer was a drunken Hispanic Rastafarian who sang Aie Yai Yai Ya….with a slur in his voice. Too funny. We then made our way back to the Monorail and to the Duck staging area. This was so cool. The guide was very knowledgeable about Seattle and pointed out many things we would have missed had we gone out on our own. For example, at the Safeco Stadium, Bill Gates was addressing over 40,000 employees of Microsoft on a state of the corporation convention. His home is about 4 miles outside of downtown Seattle and is built to resemble a Ski Chalet and has over 20,000 square feet of space. Sheese. We were taken down the Alaskan Way, which is the road hugging the coastline and also where we discovered Ivar’s!!! We never would have found it on foot and were glad we just went ahead and had lunch at the Market. We then went to the boat launch and yes, you guessed it, we plunged into Puget Sound and started motoring over the water just like that! Our guide told us that the inventor of Windows is the boyfriend of Martha Stewart and I am sorry that I cannot remember his name. However, our guide said that he encountered Martha and her boyfriend on one of his trips out just this past Tuesday and he recognized the boat as Martha’s and motored over close to it and Martha acknowledged everyone on the Duck. We weren’t that lucky. We only had the pleasure of experiencing Seattle from a distance and weren’t disappointed. We then came upon the house boats that the guide explained had been there since the gold rush. He told us that when the miners came through on their way back from the gold fields that they put over a billion dollars into the economy and the locals couldn’t afford the land anymore, so they built their homes on the sound on floated on timbers! They didn’t have electricity, water, gas or property taxes because they were on the water. Nowadays, these little 400 square foot structures go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Next we came upon the houseboat that was home to Tom Hanks in “Sleepless in Seattle”. The current owner bought it for $500,000 in 1996 and has it up for sale for $2.5 million! Yikes! The cost of living here is higher than Atlanta and I don’t know how anybody can make it here. We finished our tour on land through the Bohemian section of town where there are a lot of art galleries and statuary. We made our way back to Tacoma and our wonderful HI Express room which we decided to keep another night. We decided not to take the ferry to Victoria, instead we will drive to Vancouver, BC tomorrow and then on Saturday we plan to take the Oregon coast highway until we get ready to stop. No HI Express down that way, but we didn’t expect to find one. Hopefully, we will find lodging on the coast and have a fabulous sunset in store.