vacation day 1 - seattle

We caught an early flight to Seattle yesterday morning. I really should stop buying red eye tickets (or anything resembling a red eye, like yesterday), but I guess I'm too cheap. I woke up at 2am, and we were out the door at 5am. Our flight was uneventful, and as soon as we got our rental car, we were on the road to Mt. Rainier National Park.

I guessed correctly that a small town we were passing through would be our last opportunity to get food before going into the park, so we stopped at a small restaurant in said town (don't remember the name) and got lunch. The owner and sole employee was a British woman, and the menu was super small, so we ordered three items off the menu to share: a chicken pasty (the British equivalent of a pot pie), a grilled cheese sandwich, and biscuits and gravy. We had been considering going to McDonald's or Taco Bell, but I'm glad we ended up doing this, as all the food was homemade, and it gave us an opportunity to try something new.

Sadly, the entrance to Mt. Rainier that we had selected was closed when we got to it, so we never actually made it inside the park. We did walk around a little bit in the mountains, though, and what scenery we were able to see was pretty. There was complete cloud cover most of the day, which didn't make for the most spectacular views or photos, but I guess you have to expect that in the Pacific Northwest. This also made it such that we never actually saw Mt. Rainier.

Note how low the clouds are. We were pretty high up, but still.


This about as much blue sky as we saw:


We didn't have time to try going to a different entrance to the park, so we made our way back to Seattle, checked into our hotel, and walked to Pike Place Market instead. Pike Place Market is a very cool place to walk around. It's filled with everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to seafood, small restaurants and new age bookstores and fortune tellers. It's the kind of place I wish we had close by--I would shop there all the time if we did.







We decided to have an early dinner at one of the restaurants in the market, Athenian. The service was fairly lame, but the food was good and we had a nice view of Puget Sound from our table. We shared clam chowder, fish and chips, and a Monte Cristo (which was not completely battered and fried as we would expect, unfortunately). The food was pretty good, and Becca declared that she preferred Athenian's clam chowder over the clam chowder we got in Maine when we were there a couple months ago. I disagreed, but I did like it a lot.

The view from our table:


The clam chowder:


After dinner, we walked along the pier for a little while. An average view:



Would have been nice if it was sunny, because it's very pretty. This would be a cool place to live. While we were at the pier, Becca had to use the restroom, so I took pictures of a carousel while I was waiting:



That might be my favorite photo from yesterday. You can do some pretty entertaining things with shutter speed.

We headed back to our hotel shortly after that, and I think I fell asleep before 7pm. Pretty pathetic for a vacation, but since I hadn't woken up later than 3:30am all week, I was beat.



Next stop: Vancouver.