Seattle Day 2 – Underground and Up in the Air

For our last day in Seattle we organised a late checkout so we could leave our gear at the hotel while we went on Seattle’s famous Underground Tour. We got up early(ish) and walked down to Pike Place Market. The market was pretty quiet at 8:30 am and after a walk up and down via a brass pig,

some delicious-looking berries,

and an uncanny resemblance

we ended up in a diner at the back of the markets overlooking the harbour.

Courtney was taken with the presentation of the food (if not the taste)

The food was ok, the view was good and the coffee was an abomination.

We finished up and walked along 1st to Pioneer Square where the Underground Tour begins. Because Seattle was built pretty much on a beach, the water table was very close to the surface which made things like plumbing (especially sewerage) problematic. The town fathers took a very similar approach to Nero and when a fire swept through Seattle they decided that they’d take advantage of the devastation and regrade the entire place, raising the roads by five metres or so! Of course, this took time but in the interim, the shopkeepers needed to rebuild their businesses.

The solution was to design all the buildings to have their main floor be the second (or what we’d call the first) so when the roads were raised the ground floor became the basement. The tour takes you along the old sidewalks, now fifteen feet below the street. At street level you see a number of skylights

which provide a surprising amount of light below ground

There are entire saloons underground. In fact, after many years of neglect and disrepair, owners of the underground areas are starting to renovate and use them commercially.

This was the second time I’d done the tour and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it each time. Highly recommended if you’re ever in Seattle.

After the tour (and the obligatory visit to the gift shop) we walked back up (way up) to our hotel to check out. We jumped in the car and drove the 10 or so blocks to the most famous landmark in Seattle.

The Space Needle’s cool, but it’s not that far up really. It was nice to look out on the water though and to be able to see where we’d had dinner the night before. Thomas had fun watching a seaplane landing on Lake Union, something he’d done himself in Flight Simulator.

We did a couple of laps of the tower before we decided that we’d pretty much wrung it dry.

Next stop was the Microsoft campus in Redmond on the other side of Lake Washington. We drove across the floating bridge that carries the 520 across the lake and then parked in the huge car park under the commons. The kids had fun signing in as visitors.

We had lunch in one of the many eateries in what’s essentially the main shopping precinct of a town of 50,000 people, complete with banks, a bike shop, phone stores and heap of other things.

After lunch we ducked down to the company museum where we met my old mate Chuck Sterling and (to our very pleasant surprise) his lovely wife Pilar. Chuck and I spent some quality time catching up and the kids got engrossed again in Kinect and Surface.

We popped across the way to the Company Store, just to say we’d been there.

At this stage, we were running out of things to do. We went for a drive around campus and then decided that we’d go and check out WalMart and some other mall things.

I think this photo sums up our WalMart experience pretty well.

We left after trying on some truly awful clothes. As we were making our way towards the airport we spotted a Westfield so I cut across about 5 lanes of traffic to get to the exit and we spent a much more pleasant hour wandering around some nicer shops.

Finally we got back in he car and drove the remaining 10 minutes to the airport, resigning ourselves to being there very early. It’s a good thing we did.

After returning the car we went up to one of the self-checkin consoles and tried to check in. No luck (I don’t think I’ve ever had this work for me in the US) so we went upstairs and queued in the “Service Assistance” line.

When we finally got to the front of the line it turned out that our tickets for the Seattle – Los Angeles leg hadn’t been issued, even though we’d booked them in October! It took 20 minutes on the phone (and the reminder of my pre-paid credit) to Qantas in Australia to get the tickets issued.

In the end we only just had time to grab some food and go up to our gate.

Two and a half hours later we were in LA waiting for a SuperShuttle.

I do love it that we only travelled with carry-on luggage, it made the transition from air to ground transport so seamless. No waiting for luggage to come off the plane. I highly recommend this to anyone going on a big trip. It did help that the kids were both big enough to be responsible for a full-sized carry-on bag with a backpack as well.

We arrived at the Disneyland hotel at about 1am and pretty much collapsed into bed.