September 20th, Part Three: A view from the top and the most delicious place ever

After checking out the Chihuly exhibit, we still had a little time to kill before heading over to the Space Needle. Luckily, there are a bunch of things to do in the area right around the Space Needle.

And we immediately found my favorite thing: singing flowers! (It's actually a piece called Sonic Bloom.) They're 40 feet tall and solar powered; when you get close to them, they sing aaaaahhhhh like a church choir. Each flower sings a different note, so if you have a few people around, you can dance around and make them play songs or sing chords. It was awesome.   :)

We wandered around a bit more and eventually came across the International Fountain. It shoots out huge sprays of water that vary in size and it's synced to music. You can walk right up to the fountain and a couple people were playing in the water. Mark decided he wanted to touch the dome without getting wet. (He actually did it!)

By the time we walked back to the Space Needle, it was close enough to our ticket time to head inside. Before you get in the elevator to ride to the top, you have your picture taken by their photographer. When you get upstairs, you can pick the background for your picture and they email it to you for free. We thought it was kind of silly, but whatever...most places would charge you for the picture, so kudos to them for just giving it away!

Because, you know, it's very realistic that we would be standing in mid-air in front of the Space Needle. (Update: Turns out this is actually the view from Kerry Park. Definitely adding this to the list of things I want to check out next time; it looks like it has a really cool view of the city. Thanks for the heads up, Chris!)

A short elevator ride later, we were up in the observation deck. It had a great view of the city.

We heard a bunch of people mention the spider building. It's actually the Armory, and even though they look like real statues, the spiders are just painted on the roof. The artist did an amazing job - they looked real! I found a neat article about it here.

Visibility was pretty good and you could just make out Mt. Rainier in the distance. I still can't believe we lucked out so much with the weather on this trip.

Hello, Seattle!   :)

There were lots of seaplanes buzzing past the Space Needle and taking off and landing in the water nearby (though I didn't actually see any of them in the water while I was up there). If I ever move out here, I'm definitely getting my seaplane rating!

We hung out and enjoyed the view for a little while, then made our way back down and took the monorail back toward the south. A short walk later and we were at our last stop for the day...

...Pike Place Market!! (Yes, the one where they throw the fish, though we somehow missed the fish-throwing part.) There's no way we were going to miss this.   :)

The inside of the market was full of stands brimming with fresh veggies and flowers. It smelled amazing, and a lot of the vendors had a sense of humor with their marketing (one stand was advertising brussels sprouts as tiny green balls of death, and another had a realistic looking plastic lizard in the display with a brussels sprout in its mouth). There were vendors selling pretty much any kind of food you could think of; we grabbed some fruit smoothies and the most delicious mini maple-frosted cake donuts ever. To me, the Pike Place Market was as good as the Reading Terminal Market in Philly (and as a Jersey girl, that's not something I say lightly). It was fantastic.

Another cool thing about Seattle is the live music. It seemed like there was someone on almost every corner. These guys were great; they're called The Gin Jars and were kind of jazz/bluesy. Very cool.   :)

We wandered around a little more and eventually made our way back to the car. We still had to drive back to Oregon and had to get up semi-early the next morning for something else we had planned. We had hoped to avoid rush hour but managed to time things perfectly so that we got stuck in traffic for a while, but things eventually cleared out and we were on our way.

This is still nowhere near as bad as DC's traffic. Bye, Seattle!!

Several hours and a quick stop at a Denny's for dinner later, we were back at Sue and Wayne's house. We told them a bit about our two days and I showed them a couple pictures, then we went to bed fairly quick. We had a 10k to run in the morning!   :)