Good Friday

It has been a very Good Friday.  Kinda weird though, as Easter is not celebrated in the States the way that it is in NZ.  Good Friday is not a public holiday here, and it seems that even Easter Sunday is only regarded as a holiday by some.  So, today seemed like an ordinary working for most people.  We can nearly remember what those were like.

We had breakfast at the hotel in Portland and then hit the road for Seattle.  All pretty straightforward this time, with freeways taking us most of the way.  We stopped at Castle Rock for coffee.  We found a really nice bakery that made nice coffee too.  Good Friday.  It really is potluck when you head off the freeways over here.  They have signs for McDonalds and Starbucks etc, but whether there will be anything else seems to be a lottery.  At Castle Rock for instance, we found a one-street town and the last shop we came to before abandoning it and getting back on the freeway was this quaint coffee shop.

Anyway, it was Siobhan’s turn to drive from there, and I was pretty pleased about that.  The drawback with using the Tomtom for navigating is the habit of motels/hotels to state their address as being on a main road.  Nothing wrong with that, as often they are on main roads.  However, not very often is the driveway on the main road.  In Portland the entrance was through an adjacent shopping mall.  In Seattle, the entrance was around the back.  So, having given the Tomtom the main road address, finding the entrance has become a fun game when in both Portland and Seattle we were forced back onto the freeway before we could have another crack at finding the entrance.  Siobhan is growing tired of this practice of hiding the carpark entrance.  Not so Good Friday.

We got here early and they had just finished sorting our room so we were allowed to check-in early. Good Friday.  We have brought all of our stuff in as we need to re-pack as the car gets taken back on Monday, and we are on trains and planes from here.  We then went into town to have a look around.  We found a parking building without too much trouble.  While it looked like it was going to cost us about $20 to park there from 3pm to 9.30pm, when we got back to the car the machine only asked us for $6 so another Good Friday.

We wandered along to the Pike Street market following several recommendations.  Never before has so much crap been gathered together in one place.  However, it also had large sections devoted to fresh fish, fruit and flowers.  It also had bakeries and cheese shops so all was not lost.  There was a real shortage of food stalls though – we had driven through lunch and were planning to get something at the market.  Following our escape from the chaos of the market we did find a kebab shop though.  That was a nice lunch at 4pm.

We then stumbled upon the Westlake Centre which has a monorail that took us to the Seattle Centre.  There are all sorts of good things to see here including the Space Needle.  It is a smaller version of Auckland’s Sky Tower.  For a fee, you catch a lift up to the top and then you can go outside and get a great view over Seattle.  It was really very good.  The whole Seattle Centre is having its 50^th birthday in a few weeks.  It was built for the Seattle World Fair in 1962.  The centrepiece is still under construction.  It is a collection of big glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly.  While it is still under construction, we got a good look at some of the pieces travelling up the Space Needle, and then by peeking over the fences.  They still have a fair bit if work to have it all ready for 21 April.

We then wandered back to Pioneer Square for our Underground “Underworld” tour.  About 33 blocks of downtown Seattle is built on top of the original city.  So in some areas you can go under the streets into these mazes of corridors and see what the city used to be like.  It was really interesting.  The focus of the “Underworld” tour was on the prostitution that was a key part of early Seattle life and what they have been able to determine from exploring the many passageways.  We had to show our ID in order to be allowed on the tour, but really you’d hear worse in Courtenay Place on a Friday night (even early on).  The guide was pretty amusing, which made it all the more interesting.  I wondered whether the Underground tour (the daytime tour) might have been more informative though.

The day was not over though as the Tomtom had an exciting ride home for us in the dark.  I was driving and it refused to find a satellite signal to start with.  It then took us through a spaghetti maze of roads to get on the freeway, only to have us emerge onto a freeway doing 50mph in the left-hand lane and needing to take an off-ramp right in 1.7 miles across what was either 7 or 8 lanes of traffic.  Some people won’t have coffee later on in the evening, but the adrenalin rushes that Tomtom produces has meant that I’m finishing this entry off while Siobhan is sound asleep.  We got here safely and didn’t get hit or beeped at so that must make it a Good Friday.