The day started with a Seattle tour, run by one of the folks who works at the hostel & who seems to be the person who organises a lot of the social stuff.

There was this tour, and the cookies & games thing another night, and an event recognising the recipients of a Hostelling International scholarship/grant to … go traveling. That last one, to be honest, was mostly popular because of the free beer & wine & food.

I ended up chatting with a couple of wandering educators; One at what I think was tertiary level, and one in the ESOL space.

Both interesting guys, though history about Seattle, and Redlining, and The Pine Box from one couldn’t hold a candle to the Illuminati/Reptile People/David Iche(?)/Hillary Clinton Is A Witch coming from the other guy.

The tour took in a really big market/grocery/bookstore near the hostel, including some of the history of the founder, who’d been forced out of business by being of Japanese ancestry during WW2, and being forced to move out of the area.
Then there was a museum of the Klondike Gold Rush, which was also a National Park inside a building.
This led through Pioneer Square, site of the more successful settlement¹ which became Seattle, via a bust of Chief Seattle/Si’ahl, then past a monument² to the starting of the Great Seattle Fire, to end up at Pike Place Market.

¹ This was covered in the boat trip too, and I suspect there’s detail missing, but the gist of the thing is that the original settlers hadn’t picked a good spot. After a while, Chief Seattle suggested that they move to somewhere less dumb, and they did.
Then named the city after him.
² It’s a representation of cabinetry & a pot of glue.
You just can’t make this stuff up.

From Pike Place, I ambled down & got onto a one-hour harbour cruise.
Of which this is apparently the only photo I took.

Well, it’s a harbour; I’m sure you know what those look like.

It does have Super-post-Panamax cranes, a cruise ship terminal they built out of hope which eventually paid off, and a whole lot of little parks thanks to a city councilwoman who was very keen on actual green space.
They also mentioned that, despite the reputation, Seattle isn’t even in the top 50 cities in the US for rainfall. It does, however, rain or drizzle almost every day.

The tour was fun, and they did another one from nearby Lake Union back to the waterfront via a set of locks, so I did that one too.

This one had floating houses in a profusion of colour schemes.
Also a tour narrator who was going with a riff of all of the folks we could see being part of the tour, who were required to wave back to us, and indeed were there just for that purpose.

Gas Works Park, which … was formerly a gas works.
That’s why it’s called that.

Brightly coloured tugboats, from the days when whoever got there first got the contract, so the companies would go with very distinctive colour schemes so that any ship owner who happened to like them could identify the boat & steer their way.

The Fremont Bridge, which opens 35 times a day on average.

Tiny Little Yellow Tugboat

And the locks.
It was one of the deckhand/bartender’s first time doing the ‘tying-up’ bit at the dock, so there was the scene of the Captain leaning over the rail to talk her through it, then an announcement & congratulations afterwards.

You can just see it out of this window; There’s a floating wall attached to the side of the lock.
The boat ties to that, and it keeps the same level, presumably so that you’re not having to adjust rope length all of the time.

I retreated from the burning assault of the Day-Star at this point.
For a cloudy city, it was damn sunny that day.

Yes, I did photograph the West Point Light, in part, because it looks like it’s the lighthouse from Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” music video.

And What Of It?

Misc scenic, filtered through glass and salt-spray.

A California Sea Lion.
Apparently the process by which they get onto the buoy is … not dignified … and takes a number of tries.

The possibly-visible globe there is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Globe, left behind when the newspaper of that name moved out of the building. It’s now an Official City Landmark.

 

So, summing up?
It was nice to spend a day, or at least chunks of it, out on the water.
Managed to not get sunburned by moving downstairs when it got too bright out there, so I’m calling that a win.