Seattle & Pikes Place Market

What a wonderful, full,busy day Friday was! We got up as soon as Joshua woke us up, 5:30, got ready, hopped on the ferry, this time we left our rig in the parking lot, and took the half hour trip into downtown Seattle! The city coming into view on the water was beautiful! We got off the ferry with hordes of other people, walked a short distance and found ourselves in Pikes Place Market, the oldest farmers market still in existence, it's celebrating it's 100th year this year.

What a wonderful place! We were there really early, before 8:00 a.m. so there weren't many people yet, but all the vendors were there setting up. Fresh flowers, fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, jams, jellies, syrups, honey, and the seafood, so much seafood! You name it it was all there on the inside of this wonderful old building. Just outside and on the same block, there were many different stores, jewelry, clothes, souvenirs, food, unbelievable amounts of foods, from just about every nation in the world! From Russian Peroshkies to Chinese dim sum, cheeses made on the premises, you could watch them prepare it, and we did watch! What store we thought was really fun, was the ORIGINAL Starbucks! We each got a latte from there, we felt it was a must! Rico's favorite place, he had been there before, was the Peroshky place, we had cinnamon peroshkies for breakfast with our Starbucks, and we went by later in the afternoon and bought one of each kind of the meat filled ones, they fed us for a few meals!

There was so much to do and so much to see, the bustling of all the people, and it was still early! We wanted to buy many things, but we decided we better do that on the way back to the ferry so we wouldn't have to carry too many things, and if we got perishables, that would have been better time to do it. So we left there for a bit and carried on...

We then carried on walking through all the retails stores up and down the blocks and then found ourselves at the Space Needle. We wandered around there for awhile, we didn't go up, they told us we couldn't bring our stroller, and by then we had too many things packed into it, that we didn't want to bother unloading it. But the area around the Needle has lots to do. It's very kid friendly. There is an amusement park, a big grassy area to play, and several children's museums, we wandered about checking everything out. At one point we sat near the grassy area and rested for awhile and watched all the kids playing.

For the fun of it, we decided to count Starbuck stores, Seattle is where it originated anyway, on our travels just around downtown, we counted 10!

By this time it was early afternoon, and we decided it was already time to head back so we could do our shopping. We took the monerail back, just like the one at Disneyland. It starts and the Space Needle and ends in the heart of all the retail stores. We decided we liked Pikes Place best anyway, everywhere else we walked were all familiar stores, nothing unusual, so we went back to where we enjoyed it the most. By the time we got there, the place was packed! It was incredible, so many people, it was so much fun to people watch! We worked our way through, bought some fruits and vegetables, some honey and a few other things. We sat and had some clam chowder, and then we bought our Peroshkies and before we knew it, it was 4;00 and we knew we had to get back.

We again boarded the ferry with a horde of other people and set sail back to our little island of Bainbridge. We took another walk around the neighborhood, and then turned in, it was a busy and wonderful day! We spent one more night in our nice quiet little parking lot.