Seattle

From Mt St Helens, we headed north into the Olympic Peninsula, across the Puget Sound from Seattle.  We are camped at Escapees Evergreen Coho RV Park.  This Park is not owned by the Escapees organization, but rather is owned cooperatively by the members of just this park.  If you own in one of the co ops you only can sell your lot back to the co op and then the co op resells the lot to the next person on the waiting list, who must be a member of Escapees.  They also have some spots to rent to transients and that is the area we are in.  On a weekly rate it is just under $20 a day to stay here which makes it a real bargain.

Our first trip out of the park was to make our first visit to Seattle.  We drove down to Bainbridge Island, still on the west side of the Sound and took the ferry to the downtown harbor.  It is a very dramatic way to approach the city as the skyscrapers, space needle, the shipping harbor and the football and baseball stadiums come into ever closer focus.

We got something of a late start to the day so we were only in the city for 5 or 6 hours, but it was a great time just the same.  We strolled the various piers in the harbor.  Gary bought a bowl of red chowder from Ivers, a Seattle restaurant institution.  And as shown in the picture, it was drip-on-your-shirt good.

From the harbor we arrived at Pike Street Market which is famous for its fish market where the workers throw fish to each other.  Unfortunately our point and shoot camera just wasn’t fast enough to allow us to capture a picture of a fish flying through the air, but at least you can see one about ready to be launched(lower left corner of first picture below – click on any photo to make it larger).  The vendors of the market sell all kinds of stuff, but fish and seafood and flowers are some of the biggest sellers.  The flowers were lovely and very reasonable, but it just would not have worked to carry them about the city and back on the ferry.

As the day wore on, the city became alive with all kinds of people wearing jerseys of the Seattle Seahawks football team.  It was the night of their first home preseason football game as the defending Super Bowl champions.  As long-suffering fans of the Detroit Lions, this was an enthusiasm we had never felt before for a football team (even if hope springs eternal every Lions preseason).  We stopped by a brewpub not far from the football stadium.  We kept noticing so many people wearing jersey number 12 which had the name Fan on the back on it.  Do the Seahawks actually have a player named Fan on their team.  Nope.  The Seahawks “fans” are collectively known as the 12th man of the team because of how loud they can become in the domed stadium when the opposing team is lining up to run a play.  They set a Guinness record with a sound level of 138db at one game last season.  That is as loud as a jet taking off directly overhead at an airport.

It was then back to the ferry and watching the skyline fade off into the distance as we steamed back to Bainbridge Island.  It was quite the first full day in the Seattle area.