Seattle

Today was our day to tour Seattle with the Gray Lines bus tour. We allowed an hour and 15 minutes to drive the 23 miles to Seattle and almost didn't make it on time; morning traffic started backing up three miles from the campground and we figured we would end up missing out on the tour. Fortunately traffic cleared quite a bit after Bellevue and we made it with ten minutes to spare. Of course, we were quite appalled to find out the parking was going to cost us $30 for the four hours we would be in town but with our large F450 pick up we were unable to use the parking garages with their 6 feet height limits.

Our driver for the morning was Kiki, who is a native of Seattle who not only loves her town but her job also. She was extremely knowledgeable not only about local history, but was quite familiar with the University of Washington campus, which was part of our tour and the residential areas of Washington also. I think Kiki has a tendency to create her own tour and we enjoyed every minute of it. We started by following Rt. 520 across the floating bridge, the bridge that actually sits on the waters, to Lake Washington and the bird sanctuary, listened to a couple of Bill Gates stories (the Gray Lines folks drive a lot of his guests to his mansion for parties and gatherings), explored the Hiram Chittenden locks and watched the salmon working their way up the "fish ladders" created along the sides of the locks for the salmon to be able to go up river through the locks, wandered through Fremont, which is Seattle's answer to Haight-Ashbury and a properly quirky little suburb it is. We meandered through downtown Seattle with its many tiny parks within its boundaries and heard about the underground city created when the city was first built as the city founders tried to figure out a way to deal with having built the city on a flood plain. We crawled through the Pike Street Market with the crowds waiting for the fresh fish to be tossed around (none while we were there) marveling at all the varieties of foods and flowers and fruits and vegetables and "stuff". It was a really good way to get an idea of the city and the various sections that would be interesting to visit and explore in depth.

After the tour we decided to have lunch at the Cheesecake Factory as we had heard good things about it from our kids but had never been in one. It's quite impressive here in Seattle with an Art Deco decor and a lot of striking glass fixtures. While we were waiting for our table to be ready a single lady that had been on the tour with us stopped in also, and so we invited her to dine with us rather than have to eat alone. It turns out she had been teaching in Okinawa for the Dept. of Defense for the last twenty-five years and was on her way to Connecticut to see relatives before heading to Florida for the summer break as she maintains a home there. We really enjoyed talking with her and when she said that a group of her friends from Okinawa were going to vacation together next year we suggested they consider renting a RV and seeing the country at their leisure. She was quite interested in the idea and was going to check it out. This was one of our more enjoyable day trips and we highly recommend the Gray Line Tour company. While we were checking in for the tour we discovered they also have a double-decker bus tour that you can combine with a walking tour where you can rent a GPS system so you can ride the bus and gain information about an area, get off and wander around and the GPS system will get you around town or to the next place where the bus can pick you up to continue the bus tour, plus you can come back the next day for free and continue your tour. How cool is that? We're going to consider that when we come back to this area. And we will come back.