Seattle Day 3 & Late Flight Home – May 13, 2015

Today is our last day in Seattle before we fly home tonight at 10:00 PM.  We awoke to cloudy skies with rain showers for our last day.  The weather in Seattle has not been that good, but probably typical for here at this time of year.  It does not rain heavily, just a drizzle, but the constant grey skies and drizzle are a little depressing.

We slept in this morning, not having any real plan for the last day, mainly due to the unpredictability of the weather.  If it rains for most of the day, as predicted, we will try and find indoor activities to do, probably some shopping in nearby inside shopping malls.

We were up and getting ready when we had a disturbing event happen in the hotel.  Stephanie had just completed her shower, and I was packing, not have had my shower yet, when the fire alarm went off n the hotel.  At first, we were not sure exactly what it was, I think mostly due to surprise.  The smoke detector in the room is right above the speaker for the alarm, so at first I though it might have been the smoke alarm going off due to steam from the shower.  We looked out the door into the hallway, and the alarms were going off out there, so we knew it was the fire alarm.  We hurriedly put on some clothes for the cool weather outside, grabbed our passports and wallets, and headed for the stairway.  We were on the 19th floor, so we had a long way to get down to the bottom.

We saw a few other quests in the stairwell, but not a lot of other people, either because they were already out of the hotel, or that we had taken a few minutes to get to the stairwell to start our descent.  We got to the bottom, and headed out the back of the hotel to the street.  We had not smelled any smoke, nor heard anyone else that was waiting outside talk about seeing any fire or smoke, so we were wondering if it was a test or false alarm.

We had seen the fire department at another hotel yesterday, so I though maybe they were conducting drills for fire prevention preparation in the city.  We walked to the front of the hotel, and there were two large fire trucks outside with their lights flashing on the street in front.  We could see some of the firemen for one of the trucks removing their gear, so we were pretty sure there had not been any real fire.

We headed into the hotel lobby, and the hotel staff were acting like business as normal, except for some maintenance personnel, who were running around talking on radios and talking to the firemen who had remained.  Then we saw some policemen enter the building and overheard some of the staff talking about a suspicious person who had entered the hotel earlier in the morning.  A little while later, we saw the police bring someone through the lobby in handcuffs.  He had the appearance of one of the less fortunate people we had seen a lot of in Seattle, probably a homeless street person.  Apparently he had either set a small fire on the 5th floor, the hotel’s floor where the hotel’s restaurant/bar are located, or had tripped the alarm and set off a fire extinguisher.  We did see the firemen bring in a small exhaust fan, and overheard one make a joking comment about there being a good deal on rooms on the 5th floor, so we know something happened there.  We had to wait about another 20 minutes for the elevators to start working again, there was some issue getting them released from the fire mode, where they all get locked on the lobby floor for firemen use only.

We finally got to return to our room, the entire episode had lasted about 45 minutes.  With the restaurant being a public access point in the hotel, I guess it is hard to have key card lockout access in the elevators like we had in our hotel in Vancouver.  There are security staff in the hotel lobby, but I am not sure how much they can do in choosing who they let into the hotel, not knowing who might be going to the restaurant.  They either had seen this person or had video surveillance because we did hear them describe someone to the police when they arrived.

One we got back into the room, we both finished getting ready and did our last packing.  We had gotten the hotel to extend our check out until 2:00 PM, so we still had a few hours before we had to leave the room, so we headed down to the City Public market to look for a Christmas ornaments Stephanie had seen in one of the shops the other day.

We headed the few block over to the Market in the drizzling rain.  I took my large camera flash with me so I could get some better photos of the fish markets and also the flower and vegetable markets inside the market building.

We found the store and purchased the ornament, which is a replica of the Space Needle made out of glass, in a style typical of glass ornaments.  Since we had time, and the market was less crowded than the first day we visited, we looked around at the various crafts being sold inside.  We then headed over to a store that made fresh cheese right in side the store and got some lunch.  All of the items featured their cheese, which is a white cheese.

We ate inside looking through the glass windows watching the workers process the cheese that was being made.  We had two good sandwiches, and some macaroni and cheese in a small container.  It was all good, and of course, cheesy, like this comment.

After lunch, we headed for an inside all area called Westlake Center.  There is a large Macy’s and Nordstrom’s, and a Nordstrom’s Rack.  There are also three floors of smaller stores, and a large food court on the top floor.  Underneath the mall, over a three block span,  is the location of the light rail/bus station we had visited earlier in our stay here, and where we will be heading to take the light rail to the Seattle Airport later today.

We visited a store called Fireworks, and it had a lot of interesting things in it including the Christmas Ornament we had just purchased at the

Market.  Unfortunately, we had overpaid at the market based on the price in this store, but we had not seen the ornament anywhere else during our visit, including several other stores we had been in during our stay here.  Oh well, we had gotten what we wanted.

We then headed over to a large office building to try and make a surprise visit to someone we knew worked at the Zillow Office in Seattle.  We went inside the building and asked the information person how to get to Zillow’s Offices, which we found out was on the 32 floor.  We headed up and spoke to the receptionist, who communicated with our friend through some type of messaging system.  Unfortunately, the person was not available due to a meeting, so we headed back to the hotel to complete the last of our packing and to check out. We planned to return to Zillow later after we checked out.

We completed the last of the packing, and headed to the lobby to check out of the Hotel Motif.  Other than the fire alarm event, we had enjoyed our stay here.  They had a locked area for storing luggage, so after we checked out, we checked three bags into the hotel’s secure luggage storage.

We walked back to the Zillow building, which was only three blocks form the hotel, and this time, we were able to visit with our friend.  We visited for about 20 minutes, also enjoying the tremendous unobstructed view of the harbor from their location near the waterfront.

After the visit, we headed back to the Westlake Center to take the monorail over to the Seattle Center, which is the location of the Space Needle and for other cultural event buildings.  The monorail, Space Needle, and the surrounding buildings, now used for various cultural events, were all constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair.  It was a short ride over on the

monorail, and it dropped us off right next to the Space Needle.

There were a couple of things we could do here, either the visit to the Space Needle, or to w glass artwork display called the Chihuly Garden & Glass, which is a glass exhibit made by artisan Dale Chihuly.  Had it been sunny, we would have visited the Chihuly Gardens, but since some of it was outside in the rain, we opted for the Space Needle.

 

We headed to the Space Needle and first visited the Gift Shop, where once again, we spotted our Christmas Ornament. It was almost as expensive here as at the City Public Market, so we mentally felt a little better, and got a little laugh about how many ornaments we were now seeing once we had already purchase the only one we had seen before today.

We purchased our tickets for the ride to the top of the Space Needle.  there was not much of a line since it was not a nice weather day.  We rode the elevator to the top, and walked around the outside perimeter of the observation deck.   When it had been constructed in 1962, it was the tallest structure on the West Coast, but now, it was much lower than several other building in Seattle, including the one we had visited on Monday.

It was still interesting, and there was an electronic system to add you name to the visitors list, and to get a free electronic image of the photo we had taken by the Space Needle Staff before we entered the elevator for the ride to the top.  They place your image over several backgrounds, and you get to choose which one you want, and to get the photo sent to you via email.  You can also sent it to others via email, so we sent it to our mom’s.

We headed back to the monorail for the ride back to Westlake Center.  It was about 4:30 PM, and we decided to get a bite to eat and a couple of Happy Hour beers to kill some more time before we retrieved our luggage from the hotel and rode the light rail to the airport.

We headed back to the same restaurant we had eaten at yesterday, we knew they had good specials on both their homemade craft beers and appetizers.  We split some appetizers and had a couple of draft beers for our dinner, not wanting to get too full for the flight home.

Afterward, we went back to the hotel and retrieved our luggage from storage.  We had to do a little re-packing to put away some items we had carried with us for the day’s exploring, getting everything  into airplane mode to meet weight and security restrictions.  With that effort complete, we walked back tot he Westlake Center to the underground station for the light rail.  we waited about 10 minutes for the next train to arrive and we boarded.  It was nice because the train was empty since it originated in this station, so we had ample space for us and our luggage.  It was about a 35 minute ride out to the Seattle-Tacoma airport.  The train never got really crowded, and so it was a nice relaxing ride.

We arrived at the airport station, and the only negative we saw in this method of getting to the airport was the fairly long walk from the rail station to the terminal building.  It was equivalent to several blocks, or at least seemed that long toting wheeled luggage.  Once in the terminal, we packed our raincoats into the luggage before checking in.  ewe knew our bags were close to the 50 pound limit based on using our luggage scale, but not certain of it’s accuracy.  One bag weighed in at 50.5 pounds, and the other was 49.5 pounds.  Both were accepted, and we got our boarding passes and headed to the strip down area, also knows as security screening.

Once through that hectic process, we headed to our gate.  We had about an hour to wait before we boarded our 10:05 PM flight home.  The flight was uneventful, other than being a little bumpy.  We only got one round of beverage service before they dimmed the lights for everyone to sleep.  The flight was only about five hours long, so it was not really long enough to sleep much.  We arrived in Charlotte on time, and had about 90 minuted before getting our connecting flight home, which also went well, other than being on a smaller turbo prop plane.

We had enjoyed the trip, but we both were tired form being on the go, and from all of the walking we had done, especially over the last few days in Vancouver and Seattle.

We may post some after trip thoughts and a few more photos into the albums, but for now, Bon Voyage once again.

Chuck & Stephanie