Seattle, Washington

Kim and I left Victoria, BC, Canada on a Sunday morning. We spent most of the day waiting for, and riding ferries. Eventually, though, we made it back to Seattle, and headed straight downtown.

There's a park right downtown featuring the Space Needle...

And the Experience Music Project.

We were able to spend about two hours touring the Experience Music Project. It's sort of a "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" that specializes on the West Coast, and specifically the Seattle music scene. I toured it almost ten years ago, in 2001. I remembered really enjoying it, so I was quite excited to return, and share it with Kim again.

I was really surprised and excited to learn that a new Science Fiction Museum is now permanently part of the EMP. It was quite a bit of fun seeing so many SciFi movie props, such as R2D2...

The Terminator...

and E.T.!

After our tour of the EMP, Kim and I headed down to the Pike Place Market.

Similar to the French Market in New Orleans, the Pike Place Market is a huge open air market selling fruit, produce, flowers, and world famous seafood.

We parked just across from the original Starbucks cafe, founded in 1971. The original logo is a little more, um, revealing.

We had an excellent dinner at a place called Wild Ginger nearby, and then headed out a bit to our hotel in Kirkland, WA. We got a kick out of that, of course.

In Kirkland, we met up with an old friend of mine from high school, Tom. It was really nice seeing Tom (a fellow developer, of a different sort). Like so many others we've met up with along the way, it's been many, many years since I've seen Tom, but it was wonderful catching up and relating several years of experiences.

Later that night (after getting a replacement HTC Hero for my busted one at the Sprint store), we landed back at the Halcrows (thanks so much for hosting us!) in Bellevue. We enjoyed staying up late, hanging out with little miss Bella, and visiting with Mike and Tressa.

I spent all day Monday at the Taipei consulate obtaining a "landing visa" for my trip to Taipei, and Kim dropped me off on Tuesday morning at the Sea-Tac airport.

More from Kim's trip in Seattle in the next post...

:-Dustin