Seattle Trip recap, day 1

Last weekend, we went on a trip to Seattle, WA.  It was a late celebration of our 6th anniversary and something we'd been talking about doing for a while.  When we first met, we went on a trip with some friends to Seattle, before we were even dating, and so it's kinda coming around full circle this way. :)

We drove up on Saturday, taking a nice leisurely drive from Vancouver, to Seattle.  We talked and laughed and looked at the sites all the way up.  It's been a long time since I've done this drive and E hadn't gone further than Longview or so himself because when we went before, it was from Walla Walla, and a friend was driving.

Our hotel was one that we picked because they had free parking and was close to the Space needle, so we knew we could use the monorail to go downtown and save us on dealing with parking and stuff.  So once we got settled into the hotel and I rested a bit, we headed on over to the space needle direction to take the monorail downtown to see Pike Street market and anything else down there. 

firetruck from monorail

We stand in line, get on the monorail and I grabbed a seat real quick :)  Sit there for a few minutes, and they open the doors and tell us to get on the other one.  Oh mannnn, I had a seat and everything?  And there was a huge crowd between the two trains so we had to wait for them to get on before we made it on.  No more seats, not even enough railings to hang onto for both of us.  We get going and we end up under the edge of EMP's building and it stops for like 30 seconds. That was weird.  They start up again and we start going and get all excited, woo!  Not more than a few seconds later, we are going around a big curve and we stop again.  Ugh.  This time, we aren't so lucky at starting up again.  AND we are on an incline because it's on the curvey part.  It's super bright and sunshiny and there's no air.  And we are stuck for about 45 minutes like that.  It took 3 trips for the other monorail to come along side of us, put out a walkway (kinda makes you wonder that they already had a little walkway thing ready for this type of situation) and bring everybody back to the seattle center (I'm guessing we were very overloaded).  While we were there, the police blocked off the road below us and brought a firetruck with a big ladder.  Tons of people were down below with cameras including news trucks (we weren't even a block from one of the bigger news channel buildings, so that probably made it more of a story!)  When we finally made it off, they wanted to interview us, but I just wanted to sit down, we were so hot and sweaty!

Here's an article about the happening, with a picture of Eric walking over the walkway.

I sat on a bench outside while E got our money back, lol!  We sat there for quite some time before finally deciding we'd try to walk to Westlake center, the mall where the monorail was going to go, and then decide if we wanted to try and make it downtown or not.

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Along the way, I called my dad to tell him because I knew he'd be amused by the whole thing.  He was.  We walked into the glass blowing museum along the way, that was really cool.

My brother called shortly after to say that they DID see us on the news. :D

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We were kinda tired by the time we got into Westlake center, but we wandered around a bit and found a gift shop with some cool things and then stopped and got some bubble tea, which wasn't quite as good as the one I'd had the week before with my sisters at our mall.  That seemed to energize us a bit and we decided to head downtown or at least see what we could see nearby.  Of course, it was too late to really see much down there, about 7:30 by the time we saw the Market.  Too bad.  We wandered into a Borders for a bit and were getting really hungry by then, but we didn't see anywhere that really thrilled us between there and the mall and because it was getting late, we were worried about it being dark on the rest of our walk.  So we ate back at the mall and then headed home from there (I think we left the mall right around the time they closed!) We finally made it back to the hotel and I collapsed, way more walking than my legs can really do.

It was such a weird start to our trip, it really was my plan to walk at the most 5-10 blocks that evening and instead we stood for a very long time in the monorail and walked probably 30+ blocks.  But we'd seen some cool stuff and had some very memorable stories to go along with it!

next up, day 2 with the sci-fi museum, EMP, and space needle, along with more and more walking!...