After waking up in our fancy hotel room, we decided to go out for a cup of coffee and something for breakfast. We walked through our downtown Seattle neighborhood. There are lots of new high-rise apartment buildings here, and our guide yesterday referred to this as the “Vancouverization” of Seattle. It’s mostly good, I suppose, but the architecture is dull that even the efforts to create a pedestrian friendly streetscape with shops still cannot overcome a profound urban sterility.
However, one bit of art had an effect. Edie was really upset when she saw the dog in front of this building. She barked at it, tried to engage it in play, and only when I came and touched it and it did not move did she figure out it was a statue. Eli did not respond, but then there are times when I wonder if a brain scan would reveal much activity there.
The Seattle Art Museum, courtesy of Bill and Melinda Gates, has a downtown statue park just off Alaskan Way. The art is the usual stuff, but there are trails for bikes and walkers. There’s also an outside amphitheater which attracted an early morning yoga crowd. I thought of registering Edie so she could show them a real downward dog, but I let that thought pass….
Instead, we just continued on walking.
We returned to the Seattle Center where the Bite of Seattle was getting started again. These “Taste of…” events used to have real restaurants there, but now they seem to just attract people who do food at street fairs. I suppose in the era of Yelp! and Urban Spoon restaurants do not need to get noticed in the way they did before the internet, and it is probably pretty expensive to set up shop for a day anyhow. But among these vendors, there was one which attracted our attention for the sheer inventiveness of their food truck. What you can’t make out in the photograph, however, is the Washington license plate: SOMEPIG. I do not know whether E. B. White would have approved or not.
As I noted yesterday, the music fare, despite the reputation of Seattle for being a hotbed of cool indie bands, consisted largely of groups which might have a hard time getting a bar gig in Canton, Ohio. But there were some other attractions such as this “Dock Dogs” competition. Here’s how it worked. The handler threw a tennis ball or something like it into the pool and you get to see how far the dog can jump.
I found a cool spot to observe this right next to an iconic Frank Gehry building, but the dogs still minimal interest in watching. So we did not stay that long.
So we went back to the hotel, packed up, and headed towards Canada. Our trip went quickly, and we did not have too long a wait at the border. Still, it seemed odd to even wait at all remember the days when we could just drive over the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, have lunch there, and drive back again without anybody even seeming to notice your car in the guard booth. BC is not shy about boosting itself.
Of course, the problem with calling yourself the “Best Place on Earth” is that everybody might move there and then it would not be the Best Place on Earth anymore, would it?
We found our West End apartment and settled in. It is nice, though it is the basement unit. We have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room, and one of those rooms with the really great white dog water bowl in it. The neighborhood could not be more centrally-located.
The weather was perfect, so we headed down towards English Bay to walk along the seawall. Along the way we came across this public art installation by a Chinese sculptor. I am not sure that it is great art, but everybody seemed to think is was the perfect place to have somebody take your picture. And who are we to disagree with that?
The weather was perfect: sunny, clear, and probably about 78 degrees. The beaches were packed and those who did not have swim trunks on were at least working on their tans. Again, John decided to “go native”.
For those who did not want to venture into the Bay, the city had build an enormous heated saltwater pool right on the beach. The pool’s capacity is nearly 3000 people!
We continued on into Stanley Park. Our new GPS unit, replacing the old one which was dying and was no longer supported by the manufacturer, is so small that it fits into your pocket. It has a pedestrian mode, too, and we used it to guide us as we wandered through the park. Stanley Park is huge, and once you get away from the main roads and paths, you scarcely ever see another person. You could get seriously lost in there, so the GPS was a great help.
The Lost Lagoon at the entrance to the Park – which was our exit from it yesterday – has lovely views of the mountains to the north and the city to the southeast.
We explored the Davie Street area for dinner. Tomorrow, on to Granville Island, Kitsilano, and Shakespeare on the Beach.
