Grumpy Bulldog Does Seattle Day 4: View From the Top

Today I went into Seattle proper.  It's kind of an annoying city to drive in.  There are all these steep hills that are hard to get up and if you have to stop it's hard to stay up there until you can go again.

The first stop was the Pike Place Market.  The hardest part was finding parking.  You can park on the street, but A) Good luck finding a space and B) Good luck getting out of it with all the people around.  The GPS wasn't much help as the garage it pointed me to was just a hole in the ground.  Eventually I did find somewhere and went through the lower levels of the market.  There were a couple of used bookstores and a music store that actually sold cassettes.  I'm not sure who'd buy those.  I should have checked to see if they had 8-tracks.

I didn't buy any fish because really I have no way to cook them.  I suppose I could get a frying pan from the front desk and buy some butter or something, but that seems like a hassle.  Plus I wouldn't have anywhere to keep the fish until I got back to the motel.

I did stop to get a hot dog and chips I didn't eat until later.  I could make some double entendre jokes about wieners, but I'm way too classy for that.  I ate it on a bench across from the little park where there were a lot of scummy street people and/or hipsters.  You could even have someone write poems for you on a typewriter.  You can see some of that in the pictures:

It wasn't actually too hard to find my car from there.  And it wasn't too hard to find the Space Needle.  Though there's construction around the area that kind of messed things up.  I only bought an hour's parking, which I really should have bought 2 hours at least to have more time up there.

The science center and a sculpture garden are there, but I didn't really do much with those.  I didn't feel like spending $20 to get into the science center and I'm not sure how much the sculpture garden.  But I did spend $20 to go up to the top of the Space Needle.  It was like at the movies sometimes where for some reason people were standing in line when there were two self-service kiosks no one was using.  That way I could actually get to the 1:30 instead of 2:00 elevator.

It takes only 41 seconds to get to the top the dude said.  Of course we were packed in there pretty tight.  No one threw up or anything, so that's good.

Here are the pictures from the top:

It's not as impressive as the Sears (er, Willis) Tower because you're not up as high and you can stand on the glass and look down or anything.  Though I did get a little freaked when I realized those wires don't have any glass or plastic between them, so I guess in theory you could lose your camera through them if you were stupid enough to lean it over too far and drop it.  Somehow I doubt it'd survive the 520-foot drop.

I'm not sure what I'll do the last two days.  It might be raining, so that would make outdoor stuff hard to do.  Maybe I'll just sleep through those days.