what i did on my summer vacation: part three

Okay, it's a little late to be posting this, but the final installment of what I did on my summer vacation may be my most favourite part: Seattle!

On our last day of vacation we ventured to Seattle.  Both Portland and Seattle are on my list of American cities to visit.  (Also included: New York, San Francisco, San Diego, LA, Chicago, etc.)  Obviously, one of the major pulls in Seattle is Pike Place, but I also really wanted to see the Troll.  Don't ask me why, I just think it's awesome.  Since we only had one day, we didn't get to see near enough, but I was glad to be able to go.  We left for Seattle at 5:30am in order to beat the rush hour traffic and arrived just before 7:30.  We found some parking by the pier, and some breakfast at a really cool Sourdough Bakery.

We walked through Pike Place for a couple of hours.  Sampled fresh fruit and smoked salmon, watched the fish mongers toss around trout and sniffed all the spices.  I was particularly in love with the flowers.  I couldn't believe the piles and piles of beautiful fresh local flowers for DIRT CHEAP.



Things that you would never be able to find in Calgary, like piles of Dahlias, and if you could find them, they would be $60 a bunch, no $10.

I tasted a nectarine as big as my head.



Obviously, they discourage public displays of affection with the fruit.



We checked out the Starbucks flagship, which was really crowded and couldn't resist buying a set of mugs with the original logo on them.

We went to the gum wall. Gross.



Seriously.

Took a cliche picture or two:





And then we headed off to the Troll.



How cool is that?

At the end of the day (read: 4pm) we were exhausted!  Besides all the landmarks, we also visited a really old part of town which I know can't remember what it is called and walked around on crazy cobbled streets.  We watched a glass blower for a while, at lunch in a really delicious but really sketchy, dirty Italian restaurant with the worlds tiniest bathroom/furnace room, and took a thousand more pictures.

We left Seattle around 4pm and got stuck in rush hour.  What were we thinking?  It took almost 3 hours just to get past Tacoma!  When we finally got home we were pooped!  We had just enough energy to pack some food and our stuff up, load the car and collapse into bed before our early morning departure back to Calgary.

Once again, a BIG thanks to Krissy and Lucas for hosting us.  Other than some short trips to visit family, this is our first actual vacation since our honeymoon more than 3 years ago, and it may be our last for a while since Joel is still in school.  I would say the vacation was a huge success and on top of getting to mark two cities off my list, it was so good to see Krissy and her husband.