Seattle Trip, Day One

Last Thursday, we sent the boys off to Meme and Papa's, and Scott and I packed up and left on our first vacation without the kids! Our plan was to fly into Seattle and spend one night, then taking a clipper to Victoria B.C. and stay for a night, and then travel back to Seattle for three more nights. There is so much I want to remember about our trip, I'm going to try to break this narrative down into segments.

So, this post will be focused on the first leg of our trip--our first night in Seattle.

We had an afternoon flight out of Dallas, so we arrived in Seattle at about 4:30pm. Seattle's public transportation is pretty comprehensive--you can get a free bus ride from the airport to the light rail station, then ride the rail from there to downtown Seattle. Easy.

Well, theoretically easy. This is the part of the post which I will entitle "We Would Suck at The Amazing Race."

Here's Scott going up the escalator at the light rail station...


...and here I am going back down the escalator after we figured out that the light rail actually leaves from the other side of the station.


Hmph. Anyway, we finally got on the train and headed to Seattle. As we took in the scenery on the ride into town, the first thing I noticed was how different the houses looked. None of them were made of brick like the ones here in Dallas--they all had siding and large rectangular windows. I asked someone later about this, and he said that brick doesn't last in an earthquake. Ah...earthquakes. I am definitely not in Texas anymore! I asked the man who told me about the houses: "You get in a doorway if there's an earthquake, right?" "Yes," he said, "and if it's in the middle of the night, roll off the side of your bed. That way if the ceiling collapses, it will fall on your bed and not on your head." Useful advice....

We got out of the train at our stop in Pioneer Square, then realized that we didn't know exactly how to get from the station to our hotel. We consulted our map and got a vague idea of where the hotel was. We went up an escalator and left the station...and our hotel was literally right across the street. Bonus! :)

We stayed at the Doubletree Arctic Hotel. I highly recommend it! Nice bathrobes, amenities, fluffy duvet, flat screen high-res TV, and as everyone who has stayed in a Doubletree knows.....


...cookies. Straight-out-of-a-warmer chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies given to you upon your arrival. Mmmmm. I almost went back and asked for more.

By the time we got checked in, it was about dinner time. We were pretty tired (we had stayed up really late the last couple of nights cleaning and packing), so we decided to just eat in the hotel restaurant for dinner. (Yes, I had just eaten a big fat cookie. Don't judge me!)



The restaurant is called Juno, and it was pretty yummy. Scott and I both had a seafood pasta and some local wine. After a relaxing dinner, it was off to our room. We had to get up earrrrrrrrrly in the morning to catch the clipper to Victoria.

We had a huge wall-length window in our first-floor room, so we slept to the sound of the city. It was not like the sound of New York--full of sirens, loud voices, and car horns, but what we soon learned to be the distinctive sound of Seattle--the buses. Seattle has such great public transportation, and their buses run all night long. So our sleep was punctuated (not unpleasantly) by the buses making their rounds in the otherwise silent city.

Next post: Victoria, B.C.!