City With the Elusive Mountain

We visited Seattle last week seeing friends, family and on business. I played some, but not enough!

An interesting piece about Chief Seattle here and my largely downtown travels documented below.

Mother Mt. Rainier was "out" on my last day there. So beautiful, so large and yet so shy- she hides in the endless cloak of sky for days and then peeks out unexpectedly.


The bakery I remembered fondly from my first visit to Seattle in '95 was of course still thriving.


I had about a half hour to wander so went into the Seattle Art Museum and was enjoying several suspended Ford cars hanging from the museum's ceiling. A great use of Ford products- really. Irresponsible blogger alert: I think this exhibit was about combustion energy technology, but I'm not really sure. Actually, I don't feel so bad- can't easily find any hit of the exhibit, past or present on their Web site. Boo!




















The Space Needle in the daytime is so much easier to capture than at night.




















We were staying in Bellevue- which is a strange strip-mally, Suburban place with a downtown that has no local businesses- it's all national brand names in the city's center. Virtually every publicly held, analyst-followed restaurant chain I know of has a location in downtown Bellevue.

Washington is gorgeous, but it's also shockingly less densely populated than the Bay Area. The trees have this gigantic feel to them - which makes their colors and presence even more massive. Like most parts of the country, this area is struggling to find a balance between the American dream and nature. Or as David puts it, they've chosen to have lower density and some trees vs. transit options and very minimal green spaces- which is more characteristic of the Bay Area (but we also just generally have scrub vegetation).

While we were there, the populus defeated a transit bill and we vigorously questioned our friends about it- they were as divided as the voters. Apparently it was knocked down because it was mass transit in all the wrong ways.















This was an artist I found in Pike's Market.