Given that our number of days remaining in Seattle is quickly shortening, we decided against weather and common sense to take a ride to the observation deck of the Space Needle. The Space Needle is a remnant of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and one of the few remaining, along with the Monorail.
Unfortunately the weather was not exactly providing perfect observation conditions. Fog lay thick high above the ground turning the view into a shifting grey blob. Despite this there were still quite a few people queueing up to get to the top of the tower.
We waited and watched and soon enough the fog lifted and the view of Seattle was revealed to us.
As a side note, I’m working on embedding photo galleries in my blog so I can post more photos without making my posts epic huge and even more unreadable.
After leaving the Space Needle we had an explore of the grounds. Right near the needle is a the EMP building, a museum founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It was designed by Frank Ghery, shares many of his building traits, and has similarities with other buildings such the metal panel skin.
The museum houses the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Museum. The Science Fiction Museum is full of props, costumes, models, books and information. Because of the dim lighting within the museum I didn’t take many photos. They had all sorts of cool and unexpected things like a t-rex control interface used to animate the t-rex cgi model for the original Jurassic Park movie and the portal generator used in the very last episode of Red Dwarf.
After lunch we headed downtown using the old Monorail. From there we walked until we ran out of interesting buildings, and then we turned around and headed back along another path. I knew the Columbia Center, which is the tallest building in the city, has an observation deck so we headed there to try to visit it. Unfortunately when we got there we found out it was ‘closed’. It wasn’t late in the day so all I can assume is that Sunday is a slow day in Seattle.
We ended up walking through Seattle’s International District (Chinatown, basically), through Pioneer Square, and back up north through the downtown past the Pike Place market and into Belltown.
By this stage it was getting quite late so we decided to trek it out to the last of the three Man V Food spots – Red Mill Burgers. We got there but not early enough, Sunday trading ends an hour earlier than normal, and we were stuck. I have decided to try for this again when they reopen on Tuesday.
