Two days more in Seattle

We travel around the city some, just to get a feel for it.  The first day we take a city tour.  This place is vast: so spread out.  This is very much a very industrious city and port.  Massive container ship port right on the city dockside.  There are roads, bridges and tunnels crisscrossing the city, islands and waterways.  An unusual thing here are FLOATING bridges!  They are literally pontoon bridges across a lake.  

And then of course, they have the headquaters of Amazon, Adobe, Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Boing, Bill & Miranda Gates Foundation etc. etc. etc.  Its a city still growing.  We were driven around some very rich suburbs, some pretty poverty stricken ones were’nt even mentioned.  What we also saw, which wasnt talked about: homelessness and drug addicts - far more noticeable than we’re used to seeing, even in other western cities around the world.

There’s the Bayside Freeway that became extremely unstable after an earthquake which has been replaced by a long tunnel that only opened 4 months ago.  The freeway is just a month or so off complete demolition- an amazing task considering its through the middle of the city.

We made use of public transport, especially the Air Link, which is a light rail service (driverless!) between the Airport and the city.  It’s a 45 minute ride costing 2.50 at the most, though we qualify for half price as seniors.  Cheap as chips and very efficient.  We didnt need the buses as our little boutique hotel is centrally located, but there seemed to be plenty of those around.  What we did use was the monorail which runs between the city centre and the Space Needle, one of the biggest tourist attraction in town, (Second behind the markets)

Clean and Safe.




In the city centre we did a foot tour of underground buildings that in their early days would often be submerged by high tides.  Instead of demolishing substantial brick buildings, they chose to build a new road at a higher level, leaving the lower roads and lower parts of buildings underground.

And for our final evening, we joined the queues of thousands to ascend the Space Needle - HAD to be done - cant come to Seattle and not!

We even did the walk on the glass floor.

YES - thats my foot!  Didn’t have to wear embarrassing foot coverings, we needed to dodge the continual glass cleaning man instead.  Which is the cheapest to operate I wonder.



It’s difficult to tell by this picture that we actually had to lay back on glass that was at an angle of about 30 deg - it was rather unnerving, and I feel pretty proud of myself for doing it.

The Space Needle was built for the  1962 World Expo, many of the buildings still exist-   We didnt look at much of it because for the most part (today - a sunny school vacation day) it was packed with families, popcorn vendors and queues.  There was an interesting looking Pop Culture Museum which we might have visited had it not been the end of a long street-bashing touristy day.  Now all we want to do is return to our hotel then find some decent food to boost our energy banks before we travel tomorrow.  Which we managed I may add - thank you MANDY for teaching us how to use our phone to chase the good ones!!  (Oh my, there are some rubbish places around for the uninformed ones!)