Seattle Vacation - Day 1

Well, today is the first day of our family vacation. Bruce had been wanting to get away for awhile now, and we were trying to figure out a time and a place to go. When Debbie invited us to Thanksgiving Dinner in Shawnee we figured what a great way to just jog over to MCI and fly out to some wonderful place. But where? I'm always up for a cruise, but alas that just isn't Bruce's cup of tea unfortunately (I hope I can get him on one again someday, however). Bruce got on the internet a couple of weeks ago and looked for cheap airfare (hopefully to a location that he'd never been to before). Well, we ended up with Seattle, Washington, as our destination. We had some friends who had just been to Seattle a few months back, and Bruce had not been here before. What the heck! We also decided to take Allison along on this trip.

When Allison heard she got to ride the airplane, she was very excited! Our flight left Kansas City (MCI) about 9:15 a.m. Here we are on the courtesy shuttle from the 'economy' parking on the way to the terminal. We got to the terminal around 8:00, which normally seemed like plenty of time. I think my sister jinxed us however. She was telling me yesterday about a time when they missed their flight because the check in line was so long. I'd never seen a line that long at Kansas City. Well, today was an exception. We DIDN'T miss the plane, but we did have to stand in line for quite awhile. In fact, the ticket agents did a call for anyone on the Seattle flights so we could basically cut in line to move ahead a bit. We got checked in, walked to go through Security, and walked to the waiting area, only to hear the announcement call for families with young children being called to board. Heck yeah... So, we got on the plane. Bing, bang, boom. We flew Midwest Airlines, and this was one of the best flights I've been on for a long time. The pilots thought it would be smooth the first half, but might be more rough the second half because of cloud conditions, but I never really noticed any turbulence. Midwest Airlines serves fresh baked hot chocolate chip cookies halfway through the flight. That was pretty cool. Allison was so excited the entire flight. She was very good too. We were in the very back of the airplane, and there was no one sitting in the row behind us, so she got to get up and move around a little bit more than usual, thank goodness.

We arrived in Seattle about 40 minutes ahead of schedule, which was really nice. The flight attendant said that we should remember this the next time the flight was late! :)

Once we arrived in Seattle, we got our rental car, and decided to head to the Downtown area of Seattle. It was a fairly easy 20 mile or so drive.

After driving around the downtown for awhile, and seeing lots and lots of people and lots and lots of cars, we decided to try to find a place to stay. We have always enjoyed the Hampton Inns, so we went on the look for that one. Once found, and parked the car in the parking garage that also cost (not included in room rate, unfortunately -- parking is at a premium in Seattle), we set out on foot. We are about three blocks away from the Space Needle and the Seattle Center. We walked down there to see what was going on. We decided to ride the Monorail for the 90 second trip down to the Wakefield Mall area, in the downtown area.

OMGoodness, all the people!!!! There were just tons and tons of people walking around. We decided to walk toward the Public Market area. We walked past Macy's and they had this window display that caught Allison's eye. There were three or four trains going all around this wintery display.
It's a little dark, but here is a picture of the Public Market. This just seems like such a fun area. It was kind of hard to walk through tonight because it was just shoulder to shoulder people, and with trying to keep track of a five-year old, who will stop on a lark if she sees something that catches her eye...it was a challenge.

We did find the famous Pike Street Fish Market where the famous flying fish area, but we stood there for several minutes and never really saw any fish being thrown around. It seemed like most people were just watching, but there weren't any fish being sold, etc. So, we didn't really see any thrown fish :(

We had dinner at a fish restaurant/bar in the market area. We sat on the third floor and were able to overlook the bay area. There were not a lot of water traffic.

Now for the BIG news! So, we leave the market area, and, oh what do we do now ? where do we walk to? my there are a lot of people...are there always this many people? We come back to the Wakefield Mall area to see about taking the Monorail back to Seattle Center to walk back to the hotel. There just seems to be more and more people. We figure out that there is going to the Christmas Tree Lighting ceremoy this evening. Bruce was starting to just feel totally overwhelmed...there were oodles of people.

There was this group of people in the mix carrying picket-like signs that said "Buy More Stuff" and dressed quite....interestingly.... We are not sure their agenda but it was intriguing....