Seattle - April 2010

Seattle
April 2010

For the first time, pretty much ever, we were able to take advantage of Sean's Spring Break! I am usually always working and the only thing that changes is that Sean is home with Ethan. Now that I am a mostly-stay-at-home mom, we decided it was high-time for a little get-away. And since we are farther north now, Seattle is only about 2 1/2 hours away. Perfect!

We knew we wanted to stay for 2 nights so it would feel like we had really got away. But where to stay??? We don't really know the area, or what hotels are available, but we knew we'd like to be close to the downtown area if possible. Well, downtown = big $$$. So what to do? Answer: Priceline! We decided to try it out and see what we could get in our price range. Now, Priceline has always scared me a little because of the whole plugging in your credit card number and being committed to whatever they find, but I was willing to give it a shot. Since we figured we had nothing to lose, we put in for a 4-star hotel in downtown Seattle for half-price. We chose the dates, entered our credit card info, held our breath and clicked "Submit". Not knowing how quickly we would get a reply, we sat and waited and... our bid for a room was accepted! And not just anywhere, we were staying at the Seattle Westin! A huge, 4-star hotel right in the heart of downtown. We checked out their website and were elated with our good luck!

I love this shot I got of the hotel name. Pretty nicely framed, I thought!

The week of Sean's Spring Break, I went in to work on Tuesday and Wednesday so we could spend Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Seattle. We had several errands to run Thursday (including picking up the Honda) and left pretty late in the afternoon. Once we got there, I ran in to check us in (the card we used was in my name). The front desk staff was very nice and when it came time for picking our room, I went with a king-size bed and then told the woman helping me to please put us on as high a floor as possible because I "have a little boy who would just love it." Ha! I think Ethan could care less! It was really Sean and I who wanted to have a room on a high floor!! :) Her response, "we have a room available on the 26th floor, will that work?" My calm, verbal response: "Yes, that will be fine. Thank you." My non-verbal, in-my-head response: "Wahoo!! 26th floor, baby!!" Our room had a wall of windows, and as you can see, we had a pretty awesome view of the big city. This was what we admired at night:And in the morning, we could see a little better what some of the surrounding high-rise buildings were.
One of the buildings was all condos and once it was light out we could see that they had a beautiful terrace for its tenants. And yes, that is the Space Needle that we had a view of. No neck-craning required!

The three of us loved our hotel room! Sean immediately went for the bed... and kindly posed for a picture!Ethan was perfectly content playing "waiter" and filling our glasses with ice from the ice bucket.
The next day was Friday and we had just two main tasks: 1. Pike Place Market on the waterfront and 2. Space Needle. We decided to start with the market. It was only about a 10-minute walk, but right across the street from our hotel we found this:Part of the marquee had fallen during the night and crushed the sidewalk below. It was quite the site! Anyway, we spent several hours wandering around, checking out the shops, eating from the local vendors and admiring all of the beautiful flowers in the market. I'd say about 1/4 of the market was filled with fresh flowers and women making one beautiful bouquet after another. I couldn't get over the bright colors and also how inexpensive the flowers were! Bouquet prices ranged from about $5 to $15. Sweet! I also couldn't get over how yummy all the fresh produce looked. Check out the bottom, middle picture in the collage below - I thought it was pretty cool to see a "real" newsstand. You just don't see that in Springtucky or even Vancouver.
Here are some other pictures of the downtown area I took that day. Sean thought it was funny that I was taking pictures of alleyways and brick buildings with fire escapes. It's not like I've never seen an alley before - but, again, Eugene alleys don't look like this and not many of our buildings have fire escapes. I just thought it was neat to see some of this stuff in real life that is so typical in TV/movies! Sorry, I'm a mid-size town girl who doesn't make it to the big, big city very often!!
We went back to our hotel for a while and then ventured out to see the Space Needle. The weather was all over the place that day! We had everything from blue skies and some sunshine to cold, but dry and windy to rain and then, my favorite, wind and rain! It stayed clear most of the walk over to the Space Needle, but just as we got there it started to rain. We already knew we would not be going to the top - $17/person just wasn't worth it to us. So we stayed at ground level and looked up and admired its tallness and took some pictures!It was pretty tricky to figure out how to angle the camera just right to get our faces and the Space Needle in the picture without having to be a mile away! It's not the most flattering angle, but I do really love the picture of Ethan and Sean in front of it. Plus, the greyness of the day did not help for lighting. Not enough light, but the flash washed out faces - a point-and-shoot photographer's nightmare!

We took the monorail back to the mall that was close to our hotel and I'm pretty sure it was the highlight of Ethan's trip! I mean, look at this face, is that not one happy little boy?! He didn't stay that happy, though, when the ride was over before he would've liked. Anyway, we perused the mall for a little while and then decided it was time to get something for dinner. We thought Hard Rock Cafe would be fun and started walking there. A couple of wrong turns and a downpour later, we got there.... Of course, that was after seeing the guy on the corner puking his guts out at 7:30pm. That's a little early to be so hammered, don't you think buddy?! Unfortunately we found that it was NOT the atmosphere we were hoping for! For some reason, I had it in my head that it would be similar to a Red Robin, just not quite so overly bright and cheery. Boy was I wrong! That place was dark, loud and packed - plus the wait was a good 45 minutes! So even though we were already tired and soaked (Ethan had fallen asleep in the stroller tucked under the blanket we had covering him) we headed back out into the cold to make our way to the waterfront for some fresh seafood [for Sean]. We had checked into a place online and Sean had already mentioned a couple times that he would like to get some seafood while we were here. Well. We knew that getting to the waterfront was going to be tricky since you have to cross under a major freeway to get there... what we got, was a nightmare!! I'm pretty sure we took the longest route possible to get to where we thought we could cross. All we had to do was take an elevator down to the street level. Guess which elevator wasn't working. Yeah. Ours. Guess how high up we were. Yeah. 6 flights. Guess how we got down. Yeah. Carried our sleeping toddler in his stroller down 12 half flights of stairs!!! Oh joy of joys. After that, we only had to cross the street and walk a short distance to the restaurant - our destination was the Crab Pot. Well, the night does not end there! We walked up and thought, "this doesn't look right." But the sign for the restaurant was right there and the cooks/cashier were all wearing Crab Pot shirts so we ordered our food (Sean got fish [halibut]-n-chips and I settled for a burger). Not too exciting. We sat under a heat lamp (we were still "outside", just under their open-air shelter) and were still confused. The place we had looked at online had a large menu and looked to be a fairly big place. Sean went to check it out... turns out the Crab Pot has both a sit-down restaurant and a walk-up grill on the boardwalk. Guess where we ended up. Yeah. Not in the restaurant!! Oh well. I was too tired to care! We ate our food and Sean and I agreed a cab ride back to the hotel would be the best bet. Even though we weren't really that far away, it was still raining and windy and I'd have to say that was probably the best $10 we spent on the trip!! Besides, Sean had never been in a real taxi, my feet were sore and Ethan loved sitting between us in the back, not having to be in his carseat. It was win-win for everyone.

Now. After all of that, you'd think we'd get back to our hotel and practically fall into bed, right? Nope! Not us! We hurried and changed into our swim suits and headed down to the pool/jacuzzi for the last 1/2 hour it was open. Oh, it felt so good to warm up in the jacuzzi. :) Once we got back up to our room, Ethan got a warm bath and then I had to snap some pictures of his post-bath cuteness!!After a good night's rest [oh yeah, I forget to mention that Sean had thoroughly convinced Ethan of the coolness of sleeping in the "couch bed" which meant we got the king-size bed to ourselves!] we packed up our stuff and took a few pictures of the room before turning in our keys.
We made one last trip down to Pike Place Market before we headed home. We had to get one of those fresh flower bouquets and wanted to get it as close to leaving as possible. We also had one last piroshky (a russian pastry made savory or sweet - the beef and cheese was so, so good) and some frozen yogurt.Ethan loved going to the fish market end and even got to hold a fish this time! The guy was so nice about it. We watched as he let several bigger kids hold a fish and we asked Ethan if he wanted to. Of course! So Sean took him up there and the guy picked out a smaller fish for Ethan to hold. See that big smile? He loved it!! I took a picture and then looked around and realized there were about 4 other cameras also snapping pictures of my little boy, his big smile and the fish! Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks he is adorable!

Oh, and I almost forgot! Remember our "celebrity sighting" in Disneyland December '08?? Well I seem to have a knack for spotting Food Network chefs because I spied Chris Cosentino from Chefs vs. City! Sean didn't believe it was him, so when we got home I tracked down his website and sent a quick email to see if he'd confirm it - which he did. :)

Alright, hopefully if you made it through reading all this, you actually found our trip, the pictures or maybe even my writing remotely interesting! We had a blast and plan on going back again this year.