Okay, so I only thought the last photoblog was the photoblog to end all photoblogs.

But it turns out that this one is!

DoctorDaddy and I took a little daytrip up to Seattle today. I took the day off since he works weekends usually, we packed ourselves into the car and headed on up to the big city.

For those that don’t know this area, Tacoma (where we live) is about forty, forty-five minutes away from Seattle. We’d been planning this for a couple weeks and I was so excited that not even getting my coffee made wrong this morning could dampen my spirits for long. I ask you, is making coffee REALLY just like rocket science? Because I can’t beleive it. It seems that every single time I go through the drivethrough Starbucks near my house, they ALWAYS SCREW IT UP. Always. Soooo irritating. And no matter how many times I remind myself, I never remember to TASTE FIRST before I roll away.

Oh well. No matter.

First stop was, of course, the infamous Pike Place Market, home of the flying fish and ubiquitous sculptured pigs.

 

I wanted some of the fresh flowers, but DD very sensibly reminded me that they would sit in the hot car all day and thus only be enjoyable for about five minutes upon arriving home. So I reluctantly forgot the flowers and moved on to the cool african sculptures:

of which I bought exactly zero, because the flowers were $5 and these were like $38 and, well, I’m a cheapskate. I did find one of the Endless Knots which is supposed to represent the endless love between two individuals, but it was 50% off because it had a crack in it…and that seemed very bad omen-ish to me.

Next was the Pike Place Fish Co., home of the dudes that fling raw fish around to unsuspecting tourists. Being that although we had the requisite camera slung in plan view around DD’s neck, we were far from tourists, so we hung around trying to witness someone’s sliming, but to no avail. We did, however, get up close and personal with the Monk Fish.

Which, although I am sure he is a fine specimen of his kind, was not as pleasurable as it might have been.

We found a shop which was basically just a mishmash of everything, in which I bought a pin for one dollar that says “I <3 Thousand Trails” which reminded me of my grandparents. It didn’t actually say a less than three, it was an actual heart, but I like using less than threes. So there.

It also had signs for 12.99, which if I wasn’t such a cheapskate asshole I would have purchased for DD instead of buying my Lockspot sweatshirt (later). Instead, we got pictures:

We also encountered a Wolf Fish, which as you can see by the sign is seventy years old and “Extremely Vicious!”.

We bypassed paying a buck in order to view the shoes that belonged to the world’s tallest man (he topped out at 8′ 11″ and died when he was 22) but we did get a photo.

We took a smoke break after that and found this interesting piece of “graffiti” – a group called “Knitta” knitted a bunch of scarves or whatever for various objects around Seattle. I beleive they are trying it as an act of subversion or whatever, (you can read more here, link courtesy of DD) but I can’t see what’s so subversive about a scarf on a street sign pole:

Moving on.

We found a fiddler (well, we heard him and he was pretty much in plain sight) and I gave him a dollar.

Of course we got the obligatory pictures on the pig:

We saw a ferry, and the balloon man:

After leaving the Pike Place Market, we traveled uptown to Ballard, where I grew up. We took photos of historical landmarks, such as the high school hangout/hamburger joint where I had many a tasty burger:

and the house where I grew up:

May I just comment on that paint job on the fence? I did it with my own two hands when I was twelve years old. For being an eighteen-year-old paint job, that’s a pretty fucking fantabulous piece of work.

We then hit up the Lockspot, where I purchased the aforementioned Lockspot sweatshirt.

From there we headed to the Hiram Chittendon Locks. If you’re not familiar with locks, they’re a mechanism that allows watercraft to travel from one body of water to another where the one is higher than the other. They also have absolutely beautiful botanical gardens.

So we were there in time to see a sailboat go through the locks. The Hiram Chittenden Locks joins up the Puget Sound with Salmon Bay, which leads to Lake Union. The locks were built in 1911 in order to open up routes from the landlocked lakes Union and Washington into the Puget Sound. Since the Puget Sound side was higher than the Salmon Bay side, a canal was dug and the locks were built to allow boats to travel from the Puget Sound to Lake Union.

this sailboat was traveling to Lake Union from Shilshole Marina, probably, which is located just west of Ballard on Puget Sound (more pics of that later).

So the boat gets into the locks where the water level is high. The lock closes behind it, and the water drains out from the high side to the low side to make the water levels equal.

Eventually the waterlevel in the lock where the boat is and the Salmon Bay side are equal. The other lock doors open and let the boat out.

Then the lock doors close again to wait for the next boat to go through.

Of course, let’s not forget the sign to warn boaters not to get off their boats…which is located in the ONE place the boater will not see it.

And a few last photos from the locks – I especially like DD’s rendition of the poor man that is perpetually frozen in what we affectionately call “the dork face”.

Say hi to Steven:

Next we headed to an overlook over Shilshole Bay Marina, where I think that sailboat was coming from.

From there, we headed to Golden Gardens Park. This was after my navigational beacon failed me and I drove around for fifteen minutes before finding the little road down there, which of course was right back almost where we started by the locks.

One thing I love about Seattle. If you’re sitting on, say, a bench, at say, a beach someplace, you could look to the left and see angry gray stormclouds such as these:

Then, you could look to the right and see blue sunny skies, as shown here:

I love Seattle weather.

From there, we made one last pit stop before dinner at mom’s.

Yeah, that’s right: no visit to North Seattle is complete without a visit to the Troll:

And I really like this one:

After that we headed to Mom’s, in bumper to bumper Seattle traffic for barbecued burgers, Money Pit, and old family home videos. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothin’ till you’ve seen me do my basketball victory dance when I’m fifteen years old and being taped for the first time on my stepdad’s new video camera. There’s really nothing like it. Ask DoctorDaddy…I think he’s still in recovery.