Seattle/Vancouver Oct 2011 - Part 1: Seattle

Well, we made it to Seattle.  It was probably the longest day of my life.  Our flight to Seattle from Kansas City was at 6:30AM.  Holy Cow!!  I didn't realize what that meant.  We finished packing Friday night around 10:00pm and made it to bed around 11:00pm.  We realized that we were only going to get about 4-5 hours of sleep because we had to leave around 4:30am.  I couldn't sleep.  The dogs slept with us and I thought I was forgetting something, so that didn't help.  Then a reminder on my phone went off telling me we were going on vacation went off at 12:00am. That was nice.  I think I got about 2-3 hours of "sleep" that night.  Needless to say, we had no problem making our flight.  We got to the Parking Spot a little early for our 5:00am reservation.  The bus driver picked up some more people on the way.  One of those people was a very nice lady that reminded me a lot of traveling with my grandma.  She decided everyone needed to know everything about her.  Does it surprise you that she had a cat?  Well, we got on our flight.  We decided to pay a little more to get the Stretch Seating with Frontier Airlines.  This is a must.  It is like sitting in an emergency row, without the responsibility.  The original plan was to stay on the same plane through Denver.  When we got there we were told to change planes, but they didn't know what gate.  We asked at the gate just off of our plane, and the lady told us to go to gate 48.  When we got to gate 48, it was going to Puerta Vallarta.  As nice as that sounded, that was not our destination.  We finally found our gate, which was 52, and got our same seats. It worked out, but it was a very strange process.

We made it to Sea-Tac, Seattle Tacoma International Airport, on time.  The lady I was sitting next to on the plane, not my wife the lady on the other side, asked if we were from Seattle.  I said no.  She did not know how to get downtown.  I told her we were planning on taking the light rail, but we didn't know how to get there either.  We got to the baggage claim and ran into her there.  She informed us as to how to get to the train, which made it a little easier.  The light rail was a nice feature.  $2.75 per person from the airport to downtown Seattle.  It would be nice if our hometown would do something like it.  We made it downtown and walked a couple of blocks to our hotel, the Seattle Sheraton.  When we walked up to the front desk to check in, guess who we saw?  Yep, the lady from the plane.  It was kind of funny.

The hotel was very nice.  It was modern, but classic.  The room was not overly large, but it was big enough for us for 2 nights.  I booked it through the Starwood Preferred Guest website, and we stayed on the Preferred Guest floor.  This was fine, but every time the elevator stopped it said the floor number and then "this is the preferred guest floor".  It was kind of funny.  We dropped off our luggage and decided to head to lunch.  We went to a place called Serious Pie.  Lisa had eaten here when she went to Seattle with a friend.  It was very good.  We had a prosciutto and heirloom salad and then a mushroom and truffle cheese pizza.  Yum.  

After lunch we headed down to the market.  This place is crazy.  There were people everywhere.  Keep in mind though, it was a Saturday with gorgeous weather.  We walked both sides of the market to see it all.  We got some smoked salmon belly jerky at the Pike Place Fish Co.  Those guys are just as crazy as they look.  They also gave us a sample of their regular smoked salmon, very good, and smoked mussels.  I had never heard of that before.  They were, well, interesting.  I don't think that is something I would order.

We decided to go Elliot's for dinner.  This is a nice relaxed atmosphere.  We had a beer at the bar and then sat to eat.  We ordered oysters on the half shell and a geoduck tartare to start.  The oysters were fabulous.  I had never had geoduck before and it was very good as well.  It had a cilantro micro green salad on top of it.  These were great appetizers.  For our entrees I had a grilled salmon with mashed potatoes, apple chutney, and Lisa had prawns topped with crabmeat with rice and green beans.  This is a very generic description, but they were both very good.  We both decided we would go back to this restaurant.

Oysters on the half shell
w/ Champagne Mignonette

Geoduck Tartare w/ micro green and
cilantro salad

Grilled Salmon w/ mashed potatoes
and apple chutney

Jumbo Prawns stuffed with Crab meat w/
green beas and wild rice

After dinner we went back to the hotel.  I don't think I had ever been so excited to go to bed.

Day 2 -

We started much later than Saturday.  We got a full night's sleep and then went to the restaurant in the hotel for breakfast.  This was pretty good.  Lisa got Smoked Salmon Benedict, which was very good, and I got the Corned Beef Hash Benedict, also very good.  The strange thing about this meal is that we found out that the bathroom in the hotel, outside the restaurant, needed a code to use it.  That was kind of strange.

We then took a cab to the Museum of Flight.  This is done mainly by Boeing, I know, a big surprise in Seattle, and we got a surprise when we were there.  They were showing off the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  This is an impressive airplane.  We didn't get to go inside, but we got to walk around it from the ground.  Inside the museum, they had a bunch of different airplanes, including one from the Blackbird series, not the SR-71 unfortunately.  The cool thing about this plane was it showed the cruising speed which was i think around 300 miles per hour, but the top speed was shown as 'classified'.  Then we went to the original Red Barn, which was the original Boeing plane factory.  It had been restored as a Boeing museum/story.  across the street from the museum they had a Concorde and a retired Air Force 1, from the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon era.  We got to tour inside of these.  The Concorde was not all that different from a normal plane, a little smaller and tighter, but the Air Force 1 was very different.  The technology was very dated.  The decor was kind of funny to see at this point too.  After the outside area, we went back in to see the war planes.  They had planes from WWI and WWII.  I thought the WWII were more interesting, and it was cool because they had a plane from all of the countries in WWII.

Retired Air Force 1

View from above WWII exhibit

After the Flight Museum, we took a cab to the baseball stadium, Safeco Field, for a tour.  This was a pretty cool park.  And of course, our sunny day started to change to cloudy with sprinkles.  The tour guide was very informative, maybe too informative.  I told Lisa that we should not leave him and my dad in a room together because we may never see them again.  What was interesting is that he knew a lot about and seemed to be more interested in MLB history rather than Mariners history.  Maybe because, other than Griffey, there isn't much Mariner history.  Remember, I'm a Royals fan, so I don't have a lot more too brag about.  I didn't realize that they had only been to the ALCS once.  Yikes.  Anyway, back to the stadium, it seemed bigger and more comfortable than Kauffman.  It was more industrial than Coors or Busch.  We got to see the interview room, the visitor's clubhouse, and then we got to go into the dugout and onto the field.  It is cool to do this at any baseball stadium.  The tour ended in the gift shop, wow kind of like Disney, and we got a couple of souvenirs.  We then went across the street to the Pyramid brewery.  There wasn't a lot around the stadiums, the Seahawks stadium is next door, but it is close to downtown.  The beer was pretty good.  They had a couple of wheat beers, a hefeweisen and an apricot wheat, that Lisa liked.  Mine were ok.  None of them were as good as Boulevard, not that I"m bias

We went back to the hotel and decided to try out Ivar's Acres of Clams.  It was pretty good.  Where Elliot's had the hip redwoods and foodie atmosphere, Ivar's had the stuffy dark wood with the tacky nautical theme.  The food was pretty good.  We had clams as an appetizer, no bread.  Lisa had King crab legs and lingcod and I have a steak with Dungoness crab legs.  They were both good, but not great.  The service was ok.




Day 3 -

Our last day in Seattle.  We had two pretty good weather days and then we got the stereotypical Pacific Northwest, cloudy and rain pretty much all day.  We had breakfast at the Blue Water Taco Grill.  They had pretty good breakfast burritos.  I had wanted to try it just because I thought the name was funny.  We then hoped on a cab and went over to the Space Needle.  We didn't go up in the Space Needle because from the ground there wasn't a great view because of the rain.  We then went to the EMP, Experience Music Project.  This was a pretty cool place.  It was basically a museum of music, mainly rock, and science fiction.  We started with the Avatar exhibit.  This was ok.  I guess if you were an Avatar fan, we're not, you might like it.  We then went to the Horror movie exhibit, which was temporary.  This was ok.  Again, we are not fans of horror movies, but they had some props that were interesting.  They also had a costume from Thriller which was cool to see.  

We went back to the main area and found the Jimi Hendrix exhibit.  At this point we realized that we started in the back of the museum because we started at the end of the Hendrix exhibit.  They had several guitars that he played, Woodstock and others.  We then went through the Nirvana exhibit.  This was really cool.  They pretty much told the story of Nirvana.  They were some crazy dudes.  I didn't realize how late Dave Grohl joined the band.  They also said on many occasions how they would show their pop ability, which is ironic because Cobain could not stand pop music or culture.





Then came the day of modes of transportation.  Let me say up front, our ending destination was Port Angeles, WA and Olympic National Park.  So we took a cab from the Space Needle to the Sheraton Downtown.  We got our luggage and walked a couple blocks to the LINK light rail system.  We took the train to the airport to pick up our rental car.  We then found that Dollar rental car is off property so we took a bus to the rental car lot.  We finally got our car, a Dodge Caliber.  I was so happy not to get a minivan.  We drove from the airport area to Edmund, WA which is north of Seattle.  Edmund is where we got on a ferry.  The ferry was a pretty efficient process.  We lined up and when it was time they just load up the ferry one line at a time.  The line of the trip so far was we were waiting to drive onto the ferry and there was a hotdog stand next to the waiting area.  I asked Lisa if she wanted something and she responded by asking, "How do you think they prepare the hotdogs?".  It was classic.  I am still laughing about it.  So after a short ferry ride, we made it to shore and were on our way.  It was a pretty uneventful drive to Port Angeles.  We did drive by a town called Port Gamble.  It was a Stepford town.  Every building had similar colors with the same archetectural style.  It was strange, kind of cool, but strange.  We made it to Port Angeles and went to the National Park visitor's center.  We didn't get there until after closing time.  Then we decided to drive up to Hurricane Ridge.  A little backstory, we went to Rocky Mountain National Park about a year ago.  We had a lot of fun, but I found that I have a severe fear of driving in mountains.  We had to turn around and go back.  I'm not sure why the parks can't add guard rails to the outside lane.  I know it is a false sense of security, but it is better than nothing.  Anyway, we drove up to Hurricane Ridge, which is mountain driving.  I had looked on our Garmin topo maps before leaving to see what it was like.  I wasn't sure how I would do based off of the mapping.  We got going and as we were driving up it started raining.  It was also getting foggy.  Well, come to find out, most of the fog was low clouds and the higher we went, the more clouds we ran into.  This was great for my driving because I couldn't see the bottom of the cliff that didn't have a guard rail.  We made it to the top.  I was so proud of myself that I didn't have to turn around.  The bad part was that the information center at the top was closed, no one was there, and the clouds were so dense that we couldn't see anything.  All of the beautiful mountains and glaciers were somewhere out in the clouds.  But we did make it to the top.  That was good enough for me.  

What happened to the mountains and glaciers?

Proof that we made it to the top

Two small deer on the side of the mountain road.
They got so close we could have almost touched them.

We went back down the bottom and drove through town.  It is a nice little town.  There are a lot of little restaurants everywhere.  I couldn't believe it.  We decided to go to Smuggler's Landing.  I got a fried oyster po boy, which I really liked, and Lisa got fish and chips with a side of about a gallon of water.  I guess she was thirsty.  It was low key, but pretty good.

Seattle/Vancouver Oct 2011 - Pre-Trip

So for those of you that don't know, we are going to the Pacific Northwest starting this weekend. It is going to be a 9 day, 8 night trip. We are going to start in Seattle. We fly in Saturday at 10:00am. That's right. I said 10:00am Saturday. That means our flight out of KC is at 6:30AM. Yikes!! So we have all day (except for a nap) in Seattle. We are in Seattle until Monday when we pickup our rental car and head to Olympic National Park. I am really excited to see the Park because I have come to enjoy the history and nature of the national parks. Lisa likes the nature and relaxation. She doesn't care about the history so much. We are both really excited to use our new Sony A33 camera out there, and on the entire trip. So we are in Olympic National Park for two night and then on to Victoria, BC. This will be a cool place to see. From what I was told, I was in Victoria when I was 2 or 3 years old, but the only thing I remember is Duplos from the trip. I know, that is kind of sad, but come on, I was like 2 years old. Anyway, back to the current trip. I am looking forward to seeing the Inner Harbor and the sights around Victoria like Butchart Gardens. We are only in Victoria for one night, but then we are off to Vancouver, BC. I have heard a lot of good things about Vancouver, but I am still not completely sure what we are going to do in Vancouver. The good thing about that is, we had no clue what we were going to do in San Francisco for our honeymoon and ended up having a great time. A surprise to me, and I'm sure everyone else, is we have not booked any dining reservations for the trip. We are going to play it by ear. We have some ideas, but nothing set. So we are in Vancouver for three nights and then back to Seattle to fly home. I'm sad to say that already. I'm really looking forward to this trip. Not only because of what we are doing and where we are going, but it is time for a much needed break. We are pretty well packed. We should be ready to go bright and early Saturday morning.

I am planning on posting updates as the trip goes. I am hoping to document our trip to remember more of the details about our experiences and to share with others. I am a rookie blogger so be nice.

I have to say, we recently got an iMac and an iPad. Lisa wanted the iPad for the trip. I am actually typing this on the iPad with the keyboard from the iMac. This is really cool.

Well, more to come. Stay tuned.