Seattle - Sept 25, 2011

And we begin...

Need to go Seattle, highly recommend the Quick Shuttle service, very professional courteous driver, looked a bit like Peter Griffin from the Family guy.

The Best Western pretty much beside the Space Needle as a good clean reliable hotel.

  No picture but our first dinner here was at Assaggio Ristorante at 2010 Fourth Street, mentioned because it was so good, homemade fresh pasta with a great selection of fresh fish entries ... in a word delicious.

Breakfast at a little hole in the wall named Cafe Bee, conveniently beside the Space Needle.

Top of the Space Needle 

 If you have been down here and have not checked out the EMP Museum well it is worth a visit. They have rotating features with a couple of staples, Jimi Hendricks and Nirvana are the staples while Avatar and Battle Star Galactica are the current rotation. All great but what’s really fun is on the third and fourth floors they have personal sound booths loading with different instruments, for 10 minutes at a time you can go in and go crazy on your choice of instrument. As you can see we banged on the drums... gives me a whole new appreciation as to what real musicians do with these things. Yes if you wanted to you could go on a stage and wail away and get the DVD burned. Great for wanna be artists. 

 The EMP also has a new center stage 33 by 60 foot high definition screen with full concert speakers, they rotate a series of artists as well as film shorts and the makings of. We viewed the Avatar one and now have a much better appreciation for the behind scenes making of this movie, James Cameron basically pretty much reinvented the way movies are shot with this technology.

 We then took the Monorail to the city center and made our way down to Pike’s Market, stopping at the Kells pub for lunch. Another great spot if you happen to be down here.

Not sure how much detail I will put into this as we go along but if I see something interesting I will comment about it. 

Tip or thought of the day - Always pack a second pair of shoes or go with well worn in ones. I brought with my carry on here a pair of new sandals, my heels are sore and it is raining today. All my other shoes are already on board, thought I was being smart by saving some space and weight with my carry on...

We board the ship today.