Seattle Vacation - Day 2

After about a 10 to 11 hour night of sleep!....yes, that's right...our bodies were still on the Central Time Zone even our physical location is in the Pacific Time Zone. We were actually up and at 'em pretty early this morning. After plotting our strategy for the day and having breakfast, we set out to see how the line at the Space Needle was this morning. It wasn't bad at all. On the way, we discovered "Major Event #2" occurring....The Seattle Marathon! Yep, but by 9:30 the adult part of it had actually already ended, people wearing aluminum capes holding trophies and wearing numbers pinned to the front of their shirts were actually leaving. However, announcements were being made that the children's marathon was about to begin! :)

Anyway, we got to the Space Needle, and had a quick ascent to the top. 41 seconds I think they said it took. It was a nice sight from up there. Very cold and windy up there, however. Allison was ready to go back in very quickly. Carrie has told me that the view at night is phenomenal, so we will have to see if we have the energy to go back there after dark (we are walking a lot of places....:).

The next plan for our day was to actually to split the forces: Allison and I would head off to the Children's Museum (which Allison had been BEGGING to do since we arrived), and Bruce would head off to his interests. The Children's Museum is located in the City Center area by the Space Needle, in the basement of the City Building. The City Building is a food court and they had a stage set up today with different performing groups.

The Children's Museum, in my opinion, is nice, but I think Lincoln's is better. Lincoln's just feels warmer and more friendly. Seattle's has a little more diversity, which is probably to be expected, but some of the exhibits, i.e., construction, grocery store, etc. feel "cold." They had the temporary Sesame Street exhibit that we had actually seen in Omaha a couple of years ago, but Allison was older now and better able to interact with this exhibit this time.

This Locomotion exhibit was a favorite with Allison. The map has three routes that light up as the kids make movement...on the left hand side, they use their feet by walking or jumping; in the middle they sit in the wheelchair and roll the wheels with their arms; and on the right hand side they sit in a rowing machine. When they get to the end of the path, a light lights up.

The Imagination Station was an arts and crafts room. There was a place to paint, to make crafts with recycled and found material, and there was clay and clay tools set out. The exhibit on the wall was of found items/recycled items made into Fall theme items. It was very cute.

Allison made a 'bird' out of a pine cone with feathers, pipe cleaners, fabric, and pom pons. ....and she painted at the easel.

An interesting exhibit was a variety of different mini stores and habitats from different foreign countries, including South America, Japan, and the Phillipines.

The construction zone was fun for both of us. I, however, wanted to continue building even after Allison tired of it, but it didn't necessarily work out that way....:_)

These are some more pictures from the Sesame Street exhibit. This one on handwashing, brushing teeth, and brushing hair.

An Elmo exhibit with Dorothy the fish..........

I liked this shoe tying exhibit............

An obstacle course which was a lot of fun. More of the Locomotion exhibit.

Different tactile exhibits

This was an exhibit showing chewing, digesting, and "pooing"..yep, pooing.... A storytelling room.... a throne.........

and a butterfly type net.

We got trouble here...I wasn't supposed to let her crawl ON, just through...oops....

This room was cool, theoretically, but we couldn't quite figure out what to do....there were tubes and pipes all over this room with ping pong balls, but we couldn't figure it out....yes, I know...a Children's exhibit, but I couldn't figure it out....... There was a camping/outdoors exhibit, and there were "rocks" that we could lift up and see different nature stuff inside it. There were many different varieties.

When we left teh Children's Museum, we met up with Bruce again and rode "The Ducks" ... those land/water amphibious vehicles (because Grayline doesn't run in the winter). It was interesting, but cold. Allison slept during a majority of the trip. We drove through many of the Downtown Seattle area, and then went out on Lake Washington. Also on our Duck were members of the University of Memphis Women's Basketball Team. That was pretty cool.

These yachts were an example of about $60 million worth of equipment (about 4 of them totalled about that our driver told us).

Must go now.