Seattle; Saturday, 30 April, 2022

As it was the weekend the hotel wasn’t serving Breakfast, instead it was serving Brunch which appeared to be exactly the same menu, just everything about $2 more expensive. I opted for a lighter breakfast (mostly to save some money) which was at least served more quickly than the previous day.

After expensive breakfast I headed out of the hotel and back down to the waterside to visit the Aquarium, located in pier 59. The aquarium’s primary function is as a research facility, in particular looking at the species in the Puget Sound and how they are fairing, the side effect of that is they have a number of species that are on display to the public – including a Giant Pacific Octopus. The aquarium capture a new octopus about every 6 months to study before releasing it back into the wild and capturing another one.

Alongside the fish and octopus the aquarium is also home to a couple of sea otters, river otters, Northern Fur Seals and Harbour Seals which are all on display in larger tanks outside of the main building. The seals and otters were particularly active when I visited and I spent quite a bit of time watching them swimming around their tanks.

From the Aquarium it was about a 15 minute walk along the waterside down to Pioneer Square, the centre of the old part of Seattle. Today this is a largely brick built neighbourhood, that sprung up following the great fire of 1889 when 32 blocks of the formerly wooden city were lost to a fire that started in a hot glue pot in a carpenters. Given the state of the city at the time, and the fact that nobody lost their life in the fire, the residents were quite happy with this turn of events as it meant they could rebuild what had been a bit of a squalid dump into a much nicer brick built city.

With the need to avoid some of the problems that had been caused in the previous settlement from it effectively being built on mud banks at water level the decision was made to build the new city 20 foot higher than the old one, creating a whole underground city beneath the functioning one that was used as a dumping ground and underground world. Since the 1960;s tours have been run that take you down into the underground city and it was onto one of those tours that I’d booked myself.

With the tour complete, and back out blinking into the bright Seattle sunlight I walked the short distance to the bus stop and picked up the bus out to Lake Union and the Museum of History and Industry. The museum charts the history of the city from the first nations peoples who lived here for thousands of years through the arrival of the first white settlers, the industrialisation of the city, the great fire and the modern tech city built around major companies such as Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon.

I could have spent longer looking round the museum, but it was fast approaching their closing time at 5pm so I had to finish off the last couple of sections quite quickly to make sure I saw everything. After leaving the museum I caught the streetcar back to Westlake in the city centre and then took a bus up the (very) steep hill of Queen Annes to Kerry Park.

The park is also known as Postcard Park as the view from here is the one that adorns most postcards of the city, with the Space Needle directly in front of the skyscrapers of downtown. The only thing that was missing from my view from a full picture postcard was the lack of Mount Rainier which had disappeared into the mists and clouds in the middle distance, but I still got an amazing view across the city and Elliott Bay.

From the park I caught the bus back down the hill into the city centre and stopped off at a restaurant there for dinner before heading back to the hotel.

Weather

Slight Showers Sunny
AM PM
Warm (10-20C, 50-68F)
17ºC/63ºF