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Published: November 1st 2006
blog by Bronia Please note: this site keeps changing it's format (it's not us -we promise!) so further pictures/text may sometimes be hidden - look for arrows or signs indicating 'next' to guide you. Seattle
Going to
Seattle signified for us being on the move again.
Vancouver had been part of our trip, but it had been a sort of 'trip hiatus' or luxurious break as staying with family and friends had been just like being home again with all the home comforts. So as we packed our bags and said goodbye from
Vancouver it signaled the second and last phase of our travels - the four month section that remained through
Canada, the
USA and then into
Latin America.
Our plan for leaving
Vancouver originally meant taking a train or bus for the three hour trip down to
Seattle and finding a hostel to bunk up in, so it was a huge thrill to both of us when Bronia's friend Lisa & her husband Oliver
(see Vancouver blog for previous mention) offered to drive us from
Vancouver to
Seattle for free as they had been planning on going down there anyways. It meant not only were
they saving us money but we also had the chance to hang out for a last day together.
At about the same time an email came from Bronia's friend Tricia, an old school friend from
Vancouver, now living and working in
Seattle with her fiancee Steve, who offered their spare room to stay in for the couple of nights we were there.
A huge thanks to both of them for that and it meant that the continuation of luxury, pampering of home-style life continued until we left
Seattle.
Although I had been down to
Seattle many times over my 26 yrs of living across the border in
Vancouver, it had been only - I shamefully admit - to shop with friends as
Seattle and the local
Bellingham area are known for their shops/malls and good prices against the Canadian dollar.
This meant, that for both of us, visiting
Seattle this time was really visiting a new city as we both wanted to see the city and history it had on offer.
Seattle was fantastic. What a beautiful little city.
Officially settled in 1851,
Seattle suffered a Great Fire in 1889 (much like
London, Chicago, 
Chilli's anyone?
Seattle, Washington, USALisbon &
Vancouver did - although obviously in different years) and so the city, formerly built of wood, was rebuilt with stone, brick and steel. When you visit
Seattle today, it is these handsome buildings that you wander around.
Seattle developed as a town due to its lumber, fishing and as the last stop for gold prospectors in the early 1900's heading up to the Yukon territory in the north. The town continued to grow steadily until a further boom in 1916 when
Boeing set up an aircraft building base and then in much more recent history it is the birthplace of
Microsoft, Starbucks and nearby the birth of
Intel occurred.
With Lisa, Oliver and Marley we spent our first day in
Seattle wandering round the old district of
Pike Place Market, predominantly a fish and produce market famous for its fish tossing. Crowds of tourists with cameras, us included, gather round these fish stalls to watch customers select their choice of fresh salmon etc. and then watch as the fishmonger tosses these huge fish, tossed like an American football, from one side of the market to the other, deftly being caught in fish paper and wrapped in seconds
before it has even landed on the desk by the cashiers till. Like crowds of fans watching a touchdown or goal scored, shouts and cheers ring out from us above the fishmongers sales pitches as we watch fish being tossed and caught.
It was a beautiful day spent exploring the old streets of the city, going into little side alleys with cafes and craft shops, having a meander around the famous American department store Macy's, stopping for a bite of lunch in an old style pub with beer draft taps from all over the world on every wall, and then late afternoon saying goodbye to Lisa, Oliver & Marley as they headed home to
Vancouver and we met up with Tricia and Steve.
Staying with Tricia and Steve was fantastic. On both nights we went out with them for dinner to places that are their local haunts. This is what is great about knowing people in the towns you visit. They take you to their places that you, as a tourist, would never find. We had great meals and great company during our stay and have to thank them in this blog for their hospitality. Thanks so much
guys !
On our last full day in
Seattle Kostia came down on his motorbike from
Vancouver early in the morning to spend one last day hanging out with us before we moved on for good. He arrived early morning and together the three of us took off to explore
Seattle cultural and historic sights.
We started off at the famous
Experience Music Project "EMP" Museum built near the
Seattle Space Needle. The
Seattle Space Needle - basically a 605ft high tower with a revolving restaurant and viewing deck was built for the
1962 World's Fair.
The
EMP Museum was the lovechild of Microsoft's co founder Paul Allen who, with his very fat bank account, love of rock & roll, and desire to give a little back to his hometown of
Seattle built this building that is fabulous both for its content and architectural structure. The building itself is an undulating, shimmering, curving building designed by the famous architect
Frank Gehry who is also famous for many famous buildings including the
Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao, Spain. A swirling mass of shimmering metal and modern physic defying angles seemed a fitting place for a music museum based around
the history of music in the
USA.
We spent a few amazing hours wandering round this incredible building with one of the best laid out exhibits we've ever seen. We walked through the exhibition which took us from the early days of jazz and blues and through to rock'n'roll and into modern day music. Over 80,000 artifacts were on display including handwritten lyrics by
Curt Cobain of group
Nirvana,
Jimi Hendrix's smashed guitars, lyric sheets and artwork, through to really early vinyl 7" singles. In fact
Curt Cobain with the flannel Grunge movement,
Hendrix and many others started their careers in
Seattle. You don't think of a small town on the northwest coast of the
USA would be the hotbed of so many names we associate today.
As if that wasn't enough,
Microsoft's co founder
Paul Allen also has a love of science fiction and the ticket that we bought gave us entry to the
Science Fiction Museum, also housed within
Gehry's swirling metal creation. Having money and a love for Sci Fi has basically meant that Paul Allen has spent alot of money and years collecting every type of science fiction paraphernalia that you can imagine and
the building of the
EMP Museum gave him the opportunity to say
Hey, while you're at it Gehry doing your design thing, mind building an extra wing for all my Star Wars and Alien Gear? - my wife is getting sick of having it round the house.
- well.... I'm guessing the conversation went something like that.
The result is an incredibly comprehensive history of Science Fiction from its early days as ways of explaining and predicting the future of man, to
Isaac Asimov, War of the Worlds through to modern day Hollywood's Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien and other planetary creations. If you are fans of
Startrek, Alien films, Star Wars, Dune or ET, to name but a few, you have to come here. All the TV and movie characters and gadgets are here off the sets. Again, we have to sadly admit that we lose track of time looking around.
We managed to get out whilst there was still time in the day to go and see a bit more of the city of
Seattle that we hadn't seen the day before with Lisa, Oliver & Marley. We visited the
Safeco Stadium, home of the
Seattle Mariners baseball team and
Qwest Field where the
Seattle Seahawks play in the NFL.
We wandered along the waterfront of markets, restaurants, aquarium and old tram line climbing back up the hill where
the main part of the city sits to visit, or rather make a pilgrimage to, the ORIGINAL
Starbucks. Photo here attached on blog is where the short-tall-vinte-non-fat-extrafoam-extrahot-vanilla-hazelnut-peppermint-personal-mocha-whippedcream-latte-cappuccino-frappuccino-world-of-anything-but-an-ordinary-cup-of-coffee began.
Did we have a coffee? No. Why? Because we'd already had a
Starbucks about two hours earlier at one of the seemingly hundreds of
Starbucks you find on
Seattle street corners!!
Kostia, Dave and I meet up with Tricia and Steve, have a last meal out together at a funky Mexican restaurant and then Kostia has the freezing cold motorbike ride home back to
Vancouver at about 10pm at night. It was time to say goodbye to
Seattle and to load our backpacks up again. We were on the move again.
Chicago
Okay - so we have something to admit. We never really chose to come to
Chicago. It just kind of happened as our flight booking to
Toronto meant we had to have a stopover in
Chicago. But, seeing as we were passing through, Dave and I decided to extend it the flight delay from a few hours to a few days and explore.
Chicago was in a word; Incredible. Both Dave and I
adored the city and it's on our list of 'places to come back to' in order to see all the things we didn't get a chance to see during our few days there.
Not really flaunted by travel agents as a holiday or quick getaway city destination it remains somewhat misunderstood with nicknames like the
'The Windy City' or
'The Second City' with no one knowing exactly what that means and with a geographical location of seeming to not be near anywhere in particular. Yet, it must have something because everyone has heard of it. Right?
It was time to have a read up on what
Chicago had to offer. Like most
North American cities, before the Europeans settled, the area was native tribal land. Our
Lonely Planet guide assures us it was the
Potawatomi tribe who called this land
'Checaugou' which means
"wild onions", the reason for which we never get to the bottom of !
So
'Wild Onion' City became a European settlement in 1837 and with its location right on
Lake Michigan, one of the five
Great Lakes it was strategically located for shipping between the
Caribbean (yes, really) and
New York using the
waterways of the
Mississippi River, Great Lakes and
St. Lawrence River (in
Canada) to get goods in and out of middle America. Steel Mills and factories went up and railroad links meant that within a few decades
Chicago was an industrialised city.
Then in October 1871 legend has it that Mrs O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern and started the
Great Chicago Fire. Mrs O'Leary never lived that down because like
Seattle, the city was made of wood so it burned well. When it was rebuilt, like Seattle it too was made from stone, brick and steel and nicknamed the
'Second City'.
Ahhhh, you thought it was called the
'Second City' because
New York was perhaps the
'First City'? - Yeah, we did too.
Now onto the reason for the second nickname:
The Windy City. Apparently the reason that
Chicago is called the
"Windy City", so we were told, is not due to it being a wind-blown city with the cold northerly Canadian wind blowing down across the lake - although Dave and I can vouch for the fact that
Chicago IS very windy, and the wind can be damn cold. No, the reason it is called
the
"Windy City" is apparently due to the fact that many years ago some town councillors wanted
Chicago to be the site of the
1893 World Exposition Fair -
Paris, London and
New York always being strong contenders and winners of hosting the fair.
Apparently the World Expo Committee, still in existence today, didn't agree but the town councillors pushed so hard that they became known as those
'windbags from Chicago'.
Another "ahhhhhhh" as the penny drops. So that's where it got it's name from. I'm not sure whether I like Dave and my version or the truth better. Oh, and yes -
Chicago got their World's Expo in 1893. And again in 1933, so they didn't do badly after all.
In the 1970's traditional industries of steel and stockyards started to fail and go out of business leading to a large depression that is probably one of the reasons that
Chicago today still isn't thought of in terms of being modern, developed and attractive. Yet today, that couldn't be further from the truth.
We found all this history out and more on an afternoon jaunt on a boat along the
Chicago River and
Lake Michigan.
Some of the pics in this blog are taken from that boat trip which was a wonderful couple of hours spent out on the water on a sunny and cold afternoon and included neck craning views and fascinating history of some of the most famous architectural buildings in
Chicago.
Lake Michigan is simply enormous. Standing on the shores and looking out at the marina, docks and horizon, Dave and I could have been very easily standing at the edge of the ocean. That there is so much fresh water in these lakes is simply amazing. The lake is 307 miles by 118 miles and so deep that ships have sunk and never been found. The unfortunate thing is that it takes the fresh water within it 100 years to filter out into other lakes and rivers which means that with all the people and factories living permanently on its shoreline, it has become a very polluted lake over the years. All that fresh water contaminated. Efforts are being made to clean it up, but it is like most things on this planet - natural resources are fast withering in the face of population growth.
So what did we
love so much about
Chicago?
If you like art, the
Art Institute of Chicago, is simply stunning. It easily competes with famous art museums in
London, Paris, New York and
Spain. With amazing exhibitions of Impressionists, Post impressionists, Modern, Native American tribal artifacts, as well as art from the Orient, not to mention fascinating temporary exhibitions, it is an art lovers dream. We spent almost an entire day here just wandering the halls and had to give up on some wings of the building in the end as our minds were overloaded and our stomachs hungry for lunch.
If you like wildlife and natural history there is an amazing
Fields Museum of Natural History the building of which in itself is architecturally stunning. Again, we spent a good half day wandering around only a few of the wings of this enormous building concentrating on the most amazing collection we have ever seen of stuffed animals, birds and reptiles. It sounds gruesome but it wasn't with each case having explanations of what you are seeing, a bit about them, and sadly - if they are now endangered/extinct.
The
Field Museum also houses the most incredible collection of dinosaur
bones including one of only two complete T-Rex skeletons in the world. This one is called
'Sue' and dominates the foyer of the museum (see pic). An amazing exhibition on one complete floor took us through the creation of the universe from the big bang theory, through all the various millenia, the evolution of all living matter, our make up with the universe (complete with fascinating cases of meteorites), through to the various major extinctions - I think there were five or six of them - over Earth's history.
Somewhat disturbingly, the last message in the exhibition told us that scientific evidence suggests that we are in the first stages of the next massive global extinction. It cites global warming and all the animals that have become extinct within our lifetime, mostly at the hands of man himself, as proof. It then posed us the question of whether the human race is to be part of the massive extinction to come. Hmmmmm.... yes, well..... That gave us food for thought for the rest of the afternoon.
If you like architecture - then wow - the city fulfills that demand and some. The city is literally tripping over itself
with stunning architecture, both the traditional brick, neoclassical, and art deco styles through to the modern sweeping lines and layout of
Millennium Park.
We spent a few hours alone just wandering around
Millennium Park, created as its name suggests for the millennium and built on reclaimed and waste disposal land along the
Lake Michigan waterfront.
What makes
Millennium Park so unique is that architects, artists and designers from around the world were invited to create statues, amphitheatres and spaces in the park with their own personal style. The end result is that you wander through the park walking into different spaces created by these designers with art, angles, design and the natural green of parkland everywhere.
Within the park is the
Jay Pritzker Pavilion designed by
Frank Gehry with its grass amphitheatre and shimmering steel stage curved like a tropical seashell. We wandered over the
BP Bridge, also a
Gehry creation which snakes in curves of hardwood and brushed steel over one of
Chicago's main roads to the other side of the park as we watched the trees in their autumn splendour and people sitting below on park benches (see pics).
Another area was called
Cloud Gate designed by the British artist
Anish Kapoor and was the most stunning sculpture of polished steel shaped like a kidney bean and looking rather like a drop of liquid mercury suspended on a tile terrace. We spent ages wandering round the sculpture watching as the highly polished steel reflected the skyline and us in a distorted mirror effect. We've attached one of the pictures where you can see me taking a picture of us with the old brick skyline behind us.
From there we walked to
Crown Fountain, designed by Spanish artist
Jaume Plensa which is a fountain consisting of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool with the towers projecting video images of
Chicago citizens.
Leaving
Millennium Park we walked through
Grant Park to admire the
Buckingham Fountain, apparently one of the largest in terms of water capacity, and built on the model of one by Louis XIV in Paris.
The architecture of this city is just amazing. Even the public
Harold Washington Library, where we gleefully found that it gave free internet access (free is always good when travelling !) is housed in a stunning art deco building.
If you have heard of the famous architect
Frank Lloyd Wright, it was here in this city that he lived, designed and had many of his creations built. Famous architectural schools and universities as well as art and design colleges have set up base in this city and we walked past their doors on a daily basis watching young dreamers of tomorrow creating designs for the next buildings we will live and work in.
The downtown core of
Chicago is known as
the Loop, so called due to the elevated Train - or
'El' train that roars on an enormous steel structure two stories above your head and it was here that we found cafes to sit and drink coffee in the afternoon and restaurants to dine in the evening.
Chicago is also the sight for the famous
Sears Tower, an imposing black glassed business building soaring 110 stories (145ft) with a viewing deck for tourists. According to
Chicago's tourism blurb, they say it's the tallest in the world and that the
Petronas Towers in
Malaysia are only taller because of their aerial. For Dave and I, we have lost count of the number of cities we
have now been that say they have the tallest building. The bottom line is that it is very tall and impressive as pictures attached hopefully give an impression of.
Being on a budget, and with
North America being far more pricey than we had anticipated, we skipped the $20US per person fee of going up the
Sears Tower and went instead to the
John Hancock Center a few blocks away, another soaring skyscraper with a 94th floor observatory over the city, or if you are being cheap like us, a lounge on the 96rd floor where you get the view for the cost of the drink ($6-$11US). As luck would have it we sat down in the lounge, waited for 20min to order and pay for drinks, didn't get served due the lounge being understaffed, so we enjoyed the view, took a few pics and then took off having paid nothing !
One of our days exploring by foot we wandered the length of the
Magnificent Mile, located on
Michigan Avenue and famed for being a shopping mecca of high-end retailers and shopping malls. There is a real buzz to the street and as Dave said, it's a
street of 'beautiful people' - I'm sure he said "people" not "women" !
One of our top highlights was spending a night at the famous Blues music club
Blue Chicago that is one of the city's oldest historic Blues clubs where so many of the legends made their names. We sat in the low lit club on stools at a bar listening to the band sing the night away. In a city that was made Motown and Blues music famous, it was a perfect way to end our
Chicago experience.
I feel like I work for the
Chicago tourism board promoting it with such glowing praise but truly, it swept our hearts away and was one of our North American highlights. As I said earlier, there is simply so much to see in
Chicago that we didn't get to see. Guess we'll just have to come back one day.....
As for this trip - next stop is
Toronto crossing back into my homeland of
Canada. I've never been this far east in Canada so it's a first for us both.
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Sue Corrance
non-member comment
You learn something new every day...
I didn't know Kostia was a biker! That makes 2 of us! You'll have to give me his email (off-line) and hopefully at some point we'll get the chance to meet up this lifetime (before they withdraw my licence due to old age) .... what's bike hire cost in Canada anyway? ;o)