An attempt to catch up...

Seattle - Days 5 & 6

Since I last blogged I've spent two good days in Seattle, a long 36 hours on a train, a couple of wonderful days in Minneapolis and another long 36 hours on three more trains.

First with Seattle...

On my first day in Seattle I took a look around the Pike Place Market. It's a nice market and seems to be a very popular place to visit. One of the best places in the Market to visit is the Pike Place Fish Co. Basically it's a fish stall however the guys that work there are all about having fun at at their job. You know, despite having the handle slimy, smelly fish all day they have a ball doing. Huge salmons, or crabs go sailing through the air at regular intervals as the guys out front of the stand through customer's selections to the guys behind the counter for packing. Huge crowds gather just to watch the 'show'.

From the market I climbed down what seemed like a thousand steps to get to the waterfront... And I thought I'd left the hills behind in San Francisco. I have to say I was little dissapointed with Seattle at this point. The streetcar which I expected to see running along the waterfront no longer runs, and hasn't done for a while given the rusty state of the tracks. Also there were a lot of renovations happening along the wharfs and piers. They did have a monorail at one stage too but a fire in 2004 destroyed one of the cars and they still haven't got it back up an running.

My next stop was Pioneer Square where I signed up for the Underground Tour. That was a very cool tour. It gives you a brief history of an extremely interesting side to the establishment of Seattle as the city it is today. It was a lot of fun and the tour guides were incredible. So full of energy and knowledge. It kind of made up for the disappointment of the morning.

My second day in Seattle I walked down to the Seattle Center, the site of the Seattle World's Fair in the 1960s, to take a look at the Space Needle. Unfortunately, the fact that I could hardly make out the top of the Space Needle from the ground meant that going up the Needle would have been pointless as it would have been difficult to make out the ground. I checked at the ticket booth anyway and my suspicions were confirmed - zero visibility. Oh well, not to mind.

The rest of the Seattle Center seemed deserted and, to be honest, uninteresting. I can imagine during the summer on a nice day the place would be all a bustle but today it was empty. Not sure what impact the loss of the monorail had on tourism. I persisted for a little while and found the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. That was something to see. I spent a happy hour and a half checking out the displays that showed the World of Sci-Fi in it's earliest forms to what it is today. Lots of Star Trek and Asimov and cheesy Sci-Fi movies from the 60s.

At 16:45 I was on a train, for what would be a 36 hour train journey across Washington State, Idaho (slept through it), Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota to Minneapolis St Paul.