The Pacific North-West

Seattle, Washington. We were staying in Belltown, a part of town with lots of restaurants and close to downtown. The Ace Hotel was a very cool base for our two days adventuring. We started with a walk through Pike Place markets, home to many touristy-shops, locals buying their fruit, veges and bread, and the original Starbucks. 

We then spent hours walking through the Seattle Art Museum, which had some very cool exhibitions. Edward Hopper's Women, in particular, had some really interesting paintings and sketches, and also included some photographers who followed Hopper and his focus on solitary women, often in cafes. Hamish was fascinated with the Egyptian exhibit ("it's all so old!"), while I spent time in the porcelain room, admiring all the beautiful pieces which were grouped by colour rather than the style, date or creator. 

Several of the works had a sense of fun about them - Mann and Maus by Katharina Fritsch was brilliant and a little nightmarish! We both wanted Andy Warhol's Double Elvis for our house, and Do-Ho Suh's Some/One made us get up close, trying to see if the thousands of military dogtags that make up the armour were real.

We spent the hour before dusk walking through the Olympic Sculpture Park. Just a few years old, this park covers 9 acres and looks out over Puget Sound. Even the land is sculpted into a zig-zagging path around the artworks. 

We hid through the ship-like forms of Wake by Richard Serra - these are created with the same machinery that once made submarines, and walked under the red steel animal form of Eagle by Alexander Calder. My favourite was Love & Loss by Roy McMakin - you had to work out what all the pieces were saying, but if you look at the photo you can see the word LOVE forming from the seat on the left, through the O infront, the V formed by the tree, and the E painted on the table. The & is illuminated above, and the LOSS is formed down the hill. 

 

The following morning we went to the top of the Space Needle, giving us a somewhat cloudy view over the city. You can't help but marvel at all the straight roads in the States, and they're even easier to see when you're 520 feet in the air! We descended as the clouds rolled in, and went to explore the nearby Downtown area. 

After the trials of collecting our hire car, we returned to the Space Needle and visited the nearby Experience Music Project and Hamish made a quick visit to the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame. The EMP had some really interesting exhibits; in particular, the collection of oral histories from people involved in all kinds of music and its production, and a huge collection of guitars showing the development of the electric guitar. I spent some time looking at a collection of letterpress posters produced by Hatch Show Print. 

Distance travelled today:  61.5 miles.

Distance travelled total: 61.5 miles.

After a two hour wait for our rental car to be ready (1st it was late to the depot, then didn't pass their inspection - so had to get a different one brought in) we finally got on the road.  It has to be said, that it is a very strange feeling pulling out onto the wrong side of the road, but luckily it was all one way to start with.  We got onto the interstate ok, and enjoyed the same lane the whole way - screaming across 7 lanes would not have been fun.

We finally saw the turn-off to Olympia, 3 miles of warning later we got off, and then promptly drove past our hotel... twice... and ended up somewhere in the middle of town, without a map.

How to get out of this?  Head back towards the interstate, do a U-turn on the exit - beautiful.

Tomorrow what we do will depend on the weather - there's Olympic National Park if it's clear, or exploring Olympia before heading to Astoria.