Day 22 – Seattle Tour

Fish Market at Pike Place

Today we opted for the easy way out and took a packaged tour of Seattle instead of trying to drive to all the sights. Seattle is a large city with significant traffic jams as we found out leaving town after the tour at the same time as a Seahawks preseason game. Not much fun. Also Seattle seems to be some kind of GPS vortex as our Garmin GPS can’t seem to get its act together. I swear that in one block it told me to turn left, turn right, make a legal u-turn and also mixed in a couple of "recalculatings." Of course traffic was so busy I couldn’t even change a lane.

Snoqualmie Falls

We stated the tour at Pike Place Market, famous for the flying fish (actually tossed from one worker to another). The original Starbucks is located near there and we spent quite a bit of time wandering among the stalls at the market. The tour took us to Snoqualmie Falls (30 minutes outside of Seattle), then through neighborhoods to see where Jimi Hendrix grew up, the Kurt Cobain and Bill Gates homes, and to see the Freemont Troll (a piece of local artwork).

Coho Salmon

We then stopped to see a fish ladder. When the Chittenden lock was built between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, they also built a fish ladder to allow salmon to go from the saltwater of Puget Sound to the fresh water lake, thus letting them travel upstream to the various rivers and steams in the area. The King salmon (also called Coho) were running now and it was just at the end of Sockeye season so there were also a few of them as well. You could view the King Salmon from an underground viewing area (see photo). The King are the biggest of the salmon varieties, typically weighing between 10 and 20 pounds . They looked so good I had one for dinner!

Overview of Seattle

Our last stop was at an overview of the city for a great photo opportunity. The tour was called a Shutter Tour and we also got some photography tips along the way. Hope I learned something, at least about composition.

A couple of impressions of Seattle. One, Seattle is much more hilly that you would expect. The area near the wharf has hills that are a lot like those in San Francisco. Second, the city is really set in an idyllic environment between mountains and the sound. Very beautiful. Third, it has some of the best fresh seafood you can find. Not sure that this balances out all the overcast weather, sometimes up to 90 days in a row, but it's a start.