Sighteeing in Seattle

The airport we flew into in Oregon was not on the regular Transatlantic routes and although I flew in through San Francisco I flew out via Seattle - apparently the timings were better although it turned out that we had 6 hours between landing and take-off for London in Seattle. Fortunately downtown Seattle is only around 30 minutes by taxi so we popped in to sightsee. Nothing to do with bicycles - but hey you can't win them all.

It has been a long time since I last visited Seattle and then I basically flew in met with Microsoft and flew out again. This time I was following the first rule of regular business travel - never check luggage in, it adds significantly to the time taken to get out of an airport and occasionally gets lost. Although in my case business travel also included my cycle helmet, gloves and shorts and cycling sandals - but since the meetings were internal ones I did not have to carry business suits. It is a good job you can carry two items of luggage onto a plane since I also had my laptop, small camera, Garmin GPS and various plugs and cable - who said we live in a wireless world?

We were going to leave our luggage in the "Left Luggage" store at the airport and I wish we had, but the queue (line) was too long to waste time hanging around so we took it with us and got a taxi. The plan was to find an interesting seafood restaurant overlooking the sea and then do a bit of sightseeing/present buying. The downtown tourist area in Seattle seems to centre around a market - Pike's Market but as we quickly found wheeling a bag whilst carrying a laptop on a hot sunny day amongst the crowds is not the easiest way to go sightseeing. In the end we did find a restaurant with a balcony but when the menus arrived it turned out to be a Colombian restaurant - the beer was cold though.

The police seem to patrol on horseback and foot as well as by car in Seattle. This guy's horse knows that there are some tasty apples to be had at this door - the policeman was not really trying to get through the door. I took this from the restaurant balcony.

The market was pretty big and we did not explore all of it with our wheelie bags, although we saw quite a few other tourists pulling their wheelie bags along as well. Here is a view along one part - you can see why I was not happy about having a bag to pull, I ran over quite a few toes on my way through.

It felt like and interesting market though and clearly they had learnt the art of presentation. All the stalls were well presented and there were lots of opportunities to try out the wares before buying.

Having visited a few more exotic places in the last 12 months the vegetable stalls did not really have any surprises - but they looked colourful.

Actually there were some interesting sights - chili decorations - the hottest peppers are the two layers at the bottom - cayenne peppers and birds eye peppers I think. Hot but not as hot as Scotch Bonnets apparently - why did I ask - well we grow Scotch Bonnets at home in the greenhouse and I find them pretty hot. Mind you they stall-holder had just taken delivery of some "bonnets" - which would be appearing in a Christmas decoration imminently. One of my colleagues bought one - they supply them in cardboard boxes.

We passed a pasta stall - I ended up buying some chocolate linguine - a novelty present! They had loads of types of pasta and were supplying samples - although it is difficult to tell what uncooked pasta is going to be like when cooked. I did not get a good shot of the stall - but here is one, that because it was dark and I must have shaken the camera, gives the pasta in this box a look of movement. That's my excuse.

Outside I rather liked this giant silhouette - not sure what is was "advertising" though

Here it is from the other side looking like a giant shadow. At this point we had had enough - although my colleagues both ended up buying rockets to take home - humm I wonder if they allow rockets on planes! We stopped to get some coffee - Seattle ought to be the home of good coffee (Starbucks as well as Microsoft and Boeing are based here). We stopped at a coffee/antique shop where after the purchase of an Indian silk scarf the proprietor threw in the coffees for $3 as it rounded out nicely.

On leaving the coffee shop a taxi was passing so we hopped in and set off as we went round the block I realised that although I had my camera in my top pocket I had left the camera bag behind, with spare memory sticks, battery and my stash of English money for use when cycling (around £15 - enough to buy a train ticket and/or cold drinks/jelly babies.) Fortunately I had realised before the taxi driver had made it around the block so we went past I hopped out - picked up the bag and hopped back into the taxi. The second law of Business travel is One bag good, two bags bad, well I had violated the rule and almost paid the price.

Back to the airport - the rockets had no problem they were baking soda powered, which was not included. Mind you no-one seemed to complain about the 4 bags of carry-on luggage. The flight home was not too bad - although we were flying BA and yet again there bl**dy video on demand system failed to work properly. Every time it happens I mean to send of a letter of complaint - but of course real life sets in along with jet-lag, but I really must do it. If they can get a plan across the Atlantic so reliably surely they can screen a few movies without so much fuss and resetting.