When looking for Alaskan cruises I quickly learned that there are really three ports you can leave from (that aren’t already in Alaska): Vancouver, Seattle and San Fransisco. Because we were going to be stopping in British Columbia on during the cruise (Victoria, not Vancouver) I was going for either Seattle or San Fransisco from the initial planning stages. Eventually we landed on Seattle for a few reasons, that don’t really matter (primarily price and the overall length of the cruise). I then added two days onto our trip to spend some time in Seattle and get to see the highlights of the city.
When we finally got to our hotel in Seattle, it was only 2pm but we had been traveling for the past 14 hours and had lost three hours along the way so we really didn’t do anything but take a walk and get some dinner the first night, though we did end up watching an episode of Frasier before we left the hotel to get dinner. So we really only ended up spending one day in Seattle – but we did our best to make it a good one!
We started the day by going to the Museum of Flight, because when you are married to an Aerospace Engineer and travel to a city with that much flight history, you don’t really have a choice. It was a really great museum and is located beside the Boeing factory itself which was also neat to see. There were tons of great planes (of course) including the Airforce One that JFK flew in, a 747 and Concord.
The Air Force one model that JFK flew around in was surprisingly small. We were able to walk through it, although they had all of the seats blocked off and everything else had plexiglass surrounding it, despite all of those protection factors, it was super neat to walk around and see where the Presidents once sat.
I re-learned that my husband is very strong and can hold up an entire Boeing 747!
The sky was threatening rain all morning, which lead to some amazingly dramatic skies!
Dave didn’t really fit into the test pilot cockpit, but he squeezed in there anyway!
And apparently I have a hard time not paying attention to things pertaining to my day job…
After that we headed back into the city centre and tried to go to Pike Place Market. That however turned out to be more than I could handle in terms of crowds. I am not a fan of crowds at the best of times, but I was still pretty jet-lagged at this point and hungry to boot. We ended up getting some Starbucks from the First Starbucks store and then walking around for a little (saw some great trees painted bright blue!) while longer then getting on the Monorail to get to our next destination.
We got tickets for the Space Needle and walked around the top a few times. We ended up staring at the Cruise ships for quite some time chatting about how big they were. We saw a seaplane and helicopter from the top as well which was neat too.
We ended our day by walking around the Gardens surrounding the Space Needle and then eating dinner at Zeek’s. The pizza was so freaking good – seriously some of the best I have ever had. Delicious!
Seattle was different than I initially expected, but still a great city and I would definitely go back – especially if I could get on one of the cruise boats again!!
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