Seattle

We got home from Seattle on Saturday night around 10. It was a great trip, and definitely what we needed right before school starts. Unfortunately we didn't end up going to Anchorage, because there was a volcano that erupted there a couple of weeks ago and because of the ash in the air from that almost all the flights were still cancelled in and out of Anchorage. We may have been able to get in, but we didn't know when we'd get home. So we decided to just stay the whole time in Seattle instead. It was actually better that we did too. Dan was trying to decide if he wanted to drive to either Spokane or Columbia River, Washington on Saturday instead of stay another day in Seattle, but we decided we wouldn't have enough time to really enjoy it.

Friday, we got in there around 10 am, picked up the rental car, checked into our hotel and then went to eat lunch at Red Robin. After we finished and rested a little bit, we went to see the Seattle temple. It was absolutely beautiful, except for the work that was being done on the spire. It was covered in the scaffolding so we couldn't really even see the spire. It was kinda sad, we were a little dissapointer, but we'll just have to go back again sometime, when it's done.


Then we took a trip downtown to the Starbucks Headquarters.

We passed Safeco Field, where the Seattle Mariners play, as well as Quest Field, where the Seattle Seahawks play and added those parks to our collection.

Then we went down to the Pike's Place Market and walked around.
We saw the flying fish and lots of interesting people. Danny and I saw a girl with literally neon orange hair. Very interesting.

From there we passed the Nordstrom headquarters, as we walked over to the Monorail, which we rode down to the Space Needle.

We went up the Space Needle and saw all the cool sites from way up there, as well as heard a lot of cool facts about the Space Needle from the tour guide up there.



From there we went to dinner at a place my dad had recommended from all the time he used to spend in Seattle on business. It was called Il Fornaio, italian and delicious.
That was about it from the first day, by that time we were all dead from being up since 3:30 am, sitting through a 2 and a half hour flight, and by the time we finished dinner it was almost 8 pm. So we went back to the hotel and crashed. Danny and I went out later to get a few things from Target, which was where I bought my new favorite addiction... :D
(For hating to read, I am already through 110 pages and 5 chapters, in just a short time of having the book and not having a ton of time to read it yet.)

Saturday morning we got up and had an amazing free breakfast at the hotel. We got ready and went to do a little exploring. We drove through the Microsoft headquarters which was across the street from our hotel.
Then we went to find Bill Gates' house. We found the garage of it, but we couldn't see the rest because the front is on a lake and the rest is covered in huge trees and bushes. There was an attendant at the garage though, which was funny. Then we went to a huge mall and went shopping for a couple of hours. We finished up, ate lunch and went back to return the car and then headed over to the airport.

It was overall a great weekend, with very smooth travel. We flew stand-by both on the way there and on the way back, and luckily we got on both flights we were trying for and were all able to sit together both times. So much fun, we'll definitely be going back sometime. We definitely recommend it to anyone thinking about heading over there!