Seattle

Strictly, this belongs in the Canada post but oh well. Before we caught the train south, we had most of the day in Vancouver, so Doug went to the Capilano Suspension Bridge (which I did so not want to go to), while I went to the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens to meet a delightful and very clever twitter friend from Vancouver. The gardens are lovely, though I was too tired from an early start and bad sleep to really enjoy it. Lots of gracious planting and sculptures:

We had lunch at the rather nice café with a view over the gardens, and over the hummingbird feeders. Which gave me my very first view of hummingbirds 🙂 I was chuffed!

In the gift shop I was interested to see this, a bowl made from the pine of a tree damaged by pine beetles which are devastating the lodge pole pines in North America, especially British Columbia (we saw a lot of the damage personally). The tree’s death is caused by the beetle introducing a blue stain fungus, and it’s this fungus which gives this wood its attractive colouring.

So even though the pine beetle is a bad thing for the forests, people are turning bad into something good.

Doug took some good piccies up at Capilano:

So after all that, we caught the Amtrak to Seattle at 5.30pm. For some reason I thought we would pass Mt Ranier, which of course that line does not. But it does pass along the coast, and so we saw lots of lovely wetland/shoreline until the light faded. We were in business class but it was pretty grimy and unluxurious. God knows what it was like in economy.

I had booked a place in Seattle with AirBNB, but this was cancelled with no explanation a month before we left. So I had to madly scramble for another self-catering apartment, and hope like hell it wouldn’t be cancelled while I couldn’t do anything about it (ie after we’d left Brisbane.) But it was, so we ended up in West Seattle, no thanks to a clueless and slightly scary Yellow Taxi driver who didn’t read the note with the address I handed him, couldn’t work his GPS, and who got a bit beligerrent with us before we escaped.

The place in West Seattle was almost perfect (barring the presence of a steep, narrow spiral staircase to the bedroom which nearly defeated Doug, let alone me, and a distressingly tendency to cover every surface with knickknacks, cushions, pillows, or devices.) Excellent connections via a fast bus to the city centre across Puget Sound, and a free shuttle to the water taxi terminus at Alki Beach, which was a pleasant place in its own right:

That last picture shows sea lions hauled out onto some kind of mooring. But we saw them a lot closer than that at the Alki Beach terminus 🙂

Any place where you can see sea lions as you wait for the ‘bus’ is okay with me 🙂

As my mate Tiggy remarked, we did all the usual tourist stuff in Seattle, though not the stuff we did with her when we visited ten or so years ago. We went to the small but entertaining aquarium,

the Olympic sculpture park, the Pike Place Market, the EMP museum, the main Seattle art museum (though sadly not the Asian art museum), and the Chihuly Sculpture garden. The EMP museum was okay, not overwhelming, though it was funny watching the nerdboys walk around the Scifi and fantasy sections looking like they were in their own personal temple. It was pretty noisy and aimed at people with a greater knowledge of pop culture than me. Fun sculpture at its heart:

some fun props

And a very delapidated and unscary Dalek made of chipboard

The art museum had some great pieces but the place that really blew us was the Chihuly garden. I’m a sucker for beautiful glass, and this stuff is gorgeous

Nearly as wonderful was the little art museum at Bainbridge Island (reachable by a short, pleasant ferry ride). This pretty town’s main street had several tempting art galleries of very high standard, so it was no surprise that the (free) museum of art was also excellent. They had an exhibition by Jenny Andersen, a ceramic artist of awe-inspiring talent:

To escape a sudden mini heatwave in Seattle on our last but one day there, we took another ferry ride, this time to Bremerton, which is basically a naval town. Nothing much to see unless you like historic ships and naval museums

or have a car, but right by the ferry terminal, there is a lovely little fountain park:

We had had some good visibility of Mt Ranier for the previous few days, and were able to get at least one decent shot:

and of Glacier Peak (I think – oops, no, It’s Mt Baker, thanks Tiggy) behind Seattle:

I met two more great Twitter friends in Seattle, Shannon and Lis, and had supper/lunch respectively with them. Gosh, a social life 🙂 We were also able to catch up with Tiggy, who drove us to the very swishy Cedarbrook Lodge which we defiled with our low class presence ( 🙂 ) and ate a very nice lunch in the Copperleaf Restaurant there (though I declined to eat the prix fixé option celebrating a tomato festival – too much of a good thing.) Thank you, Tiggy, and the lift to the airport afterwards – it was a lovely day with you.

And then onto San Francisco!