Seattle (Day 2): Blitz Morning Mode

Wow! So this whole vacation thing is taking a  million years to get going.  But hey, that’s the perk of having a blog, right? You put up the content as you see fit.  We’ll be going a little faster through my vacation (back in May) now that I have more time and festival season is (mostly) over.

If you missed the 3 part Day 1, you can see it here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Now on with business! We had a morning before we had to board the ship back at Pier 66 where we scoped out the day before.  We had set some closer destinations to the hotel to visit.  By the way, in case I didn’t mention before, we stayed at Inn at Queen Anne.  The exterior and surrounding of the hotel is nice.  A little off downtown but its a decent location near a bus stop. Also, the rooms itself are a little run down but it does include a kitchenette.  It was one of the more affordable choices at the time and since we were only staying for two nights, it was okay.  We really just went back to rest and sleep.  I mean, we had more than enough time to sit around when we were on the cruise (although you’ll see that I didn’t do much of that).

The morning, we did a crazy run through everything in KeyArena area.  We went in to visit some of the places but only took pictures of certain other ones.

First stop was pictures of Space Needle.

We already went to see the Observatory the day before so we didn’t see the need to go up the Space Needle.  We sat around while waiting for museums to open and admired it while playing games on our devices (?).  My mom and her friends were completely obsessed with trying to beat 2048. So I just walked around and took pictures.

Around the area, we also came across this lovely and innovative exhibit called Sonic Bloom.

Its pretty cool because on the top of the flowers are solar panels which activate it to light up at night.  While also having sensors that when you walk past each makes a different sound so you can actually make music if you run through it in certain sequences.  Super awesome, right?

While we were waiting, we also took a little walk around the EMP museum which had a cool exhibit but no one else was interested so we ended up skipping it. However, that building was designed really nice. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a picture that did it justice.

Finally, at 10 (or something), one of our must-sees opened up and it was the Chihuly Garden and Glass.  I may have reversed the name but the point is there.  This place is full of blown glass crafted to look like different scenery. Its not only an indoor exhibit.  It also has an outdoor portion.  There’s a few of my favorites.

Sea scape with tons of little sea creatures at the bottom

A rainbow room casted from the glass sculptures scattered on the top

Pond scene

Boat ride scene

Japanese tree outdoors scene

Isn’t that beautiful? That’s like 10% of the exhibits.  The outdoors has the reanimated in glass version of tons of plants.  You can see it on their site.

We also did a quick visit of Pacific Science Centre.

Pacific Science Centre Outdoors area

When I say this was a brief visit, I mean like we ran through all the exhibits included in the general admission.  If we had more time and paid for the special exhibit it was a cool one on Pompeii. That would have been really fun.

All that running took up most of the morning and we went so fast and efficient that we had time before going to grab our bags and walk to Pier 66, so we sat down at the dome that turned into a fountain and watched the show a little while some kids were playing around in the water. It was pretty fun, just to relax a little and take in the city a little.

KeyArena

The weather had stayed really nice.  We sat outside to take in some sun before heading back to the hotel to get our luggage.

That’s it for this part.  Day 2 is split into two parts.  When we get back to the next vacation post, we’ll be heading on the cruise for probably the first 2 days, since we were at sea for that duration of time 😉

Have you been to Seattle? What did you enjoy? What attractions do you seek out when you travel?