Downtown Seattle

On Tuesday, we headed out to see what downtown Seattle had to offer. There were certain things we knew we wanted to see, but we didn't have too much planned so we could wander wherever the wind took us.

We weren't in a rush, so we didn't leave until mid-morning. On our way there, we caught out first glimpse of Mount Rainier.

As we made our way into the city, we also passed by the Seattle Seahawks Stadium. Mind you, this was just after the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. There were #12 banners every where. I literally mean everywhere. You couldn't turn around without seeing something about the Seahawks. If it wasn't something Seahawks related, then it was a Starbucks. HaHa. We had a running tally of how many Starbucks we saw. After losing count, I roughly estimated that it worked out to one every other block.

The first place we decided to go in Seattle was the Pike Place Market. Besides the Space Needle, the sign for the Pike Place Market is probably one of the most recognizable symbols of Seattle.

A lot of different stuff is sold at the market, from fresh fish, fresh produce, flowers, art, and other trinkets. Monk Fish anyone?

One of my favorite things about the market was all the neon signs. For some reason, I always love taking pictures of neon signs.

Perhaps one of the lesser known attractions in Seattle, at least to outsiders, is the Gum Wall. I think the name pretty much explains it.

The entire alley smelled like Bubbalicious.

Jamie's Grandma loves Starbucks. So Jamie had to get a cup of coffee from the 1st Starbucks location and send a picture of it to her Grandma.

(in 71 this is where it all began.)

Here's another sign for the Pike Place Market for a different entrance.

At one end of the Market, there was a park that had good views of the Sound.

And of course, there were ferry boats.

After we were done visiting the market, we decided to go get lunch. We ended up eating at a Qdoba. Nothing too special about it, except that it had a token operated lock to get into the bathroom. So obviously, you could only get a token after buying a meal. I'd never seen that before.

When we were done with lunch, we went over to the Space Needle.

At about this time, it started to sprinkle. But being in Seattle, I guess thats to be expected.

In order to get to the Space Needle, we took the monorail.

Beautiful wife waiting for the monorail.

Silly Daniel waiting for the monorail.

After riding the monorail back from the Space Needle, we went to the Seattle Aquarium. I think Jonah really enjoyed this. They had tide pools where you could reach in and touch Starfish. There was also a tank with a huge octopus, which really intrigued Jonah.

It was a really fun day. I'm not typically a fan of spending much time in big cities. But I have to admit, Seattle is a pretty cool place. I would definitely suggest visiting if you ever get the chance. I'm thinking we might have go back again some time ourselves.

Point Defiance

On Monday, we had the grand idea to all go to Mount Rainier National Park. So we loaded up the car, and headed down the road to the park.

About half way down the road, our plans hit a bump. Our friend wasn't feeling too good, and we had to  pull over to the side of the road. Needless to say, our trip to Mount Rainier was canceled for the day.

But that didn't stop us from having a good time that day. We dropped our sick friend off back at their house to recuperate, while the rest of us headed off to Point Defiance.

Point Defiance is a peninsula that sticks out into the Puget Sound. There is a nice park there, along with a zoo, which we visited later in the week. We decided to walk along the sound with Jonah.

As we walked along we saw a harbor seal swimming in the water, though I couldn't get a good picture of him. He was far out there and would only surface for a few seconds at a time.

It amazed me at how green everything was even in the middle of February.

It was a simple day spent with friends and family. You really can't ask for much more.

Leaving for Seattle

We recently got back home from a trip to Seattle. It's crazy to think that it's already been over two weeks since we flew out there. So I figure I better get to blogging the trip before I start to forget all that we did.

So...

Jamie and I have some very very close friends who moved to Seattle. My friend is in the Air Force and is currently stationed there. We knew we wanted to go out to visit them, but it is always hard to find the money to pay for flights. Due to the possibility of being assigned to a different air base, we knew our friends wouldn't necessarily stay in Seattle too much longer. Then they got pregnant and had a little boy, so we knew we had to get out there to visit them. We decided this was going to be the year that we were going to visit them. At first we were planning on going in late spring to early summer (thinking that the weather would be nice that time of year), but then Jamie got pregnant with her due date around that time. Consequently, we had to move our trip earlier in the year.

Anyways, our flight out was early on a Saturday morning. We went to Jamie's parents house to have them drive us to the airport, so we didn't have to leave our car. We checked in, said our goodbyes, and went through Security. Everything was going fine so far.

Jonah and I walked around a little bit to pass the time before we had to board the plane.

Jonah was such a big boy, carrying all his own stuff in his own backpack.

Before we knew it, we were in our seats on the plane. We sat there waiting for the plane to take off.

Waiting. Waiting. Still Waiting.

The pilot came on and told us there was some kind of warning light on in the cockpit and that maintenance needed to come to check it out.

Waiting. Waiting.

The pilot informs us that the maintenance guys is on his way but is working on the other side of the airport.

Waiting.

The maintenance guy arrives but apparently needs to get some info from Chicago in order to fix it.

Waiting. Waiting. More Waiting.

The pilot tells us that we are going to de-board the plane while the maintenance guy fixes the issue. We get off the plane and everyone immediately scrambles to try to reschedule their connecting flights.

More waiting. More Waiting. And even more Waiting.

We finally are allowed to get back on the plane. We take off, fly for a while, and finally land in Denver, well after our connecting flight to Seattle had left.

We had to rush to the customer service desk to try to get the next earliest flight to Seattle. Unfortunately, the earliest flight that we could get on wasn't till the end of the day. So we had a lot of time to kill. We ended up just hanging around the airport all afternoon. We had some lunch and dinner. Jonah had some fun playing on the moving sidewalks.

Spending some time watching Thomas the tank engine.

Finally after a very long day, without Jonah taking a nap might I add, we finally boarded our plane to Seattle. Jonah did really really good on our first flight. But on this flight, he was tired and a little fussy. Thankfully, he fell asleep shortly after take off.

Eventually, we landed in Seattle. Or at least we were told it was Seattle. It didn't look like what I thought Seattle would look like, in that there was a lot of snow on the ground. Apparently we had brought our crazy Michigan snowstorms with us. Which only made our day longer. The roads were terrible, and it took our friend a lot longer to get to the airport. She survived the drive though, thankfully.

By the time we got to our friends house, it was 4am eastern time. We had been up for almost 24 hours. It was a very long and tiring day.

When we woke up, we saw this. Not a ton of snow (especially by Michigan standards), but enough to make driving a mess.

On Sunday we didn't really do anything. We just relaxed and tried to recuperate from the day before.

That was pretty much our first two days of vacation.