Seattle

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So we're now in san francisco having caught the starlight train from seattle, we were only in seattle for a couple of days but its a lovely city and we could have stayed longer. The hostel we stayed at was 40 minutes from downtown but it was worth the journey. it was in a house with big open planned areas, it was very clean and nicely decorated (it had orchids in the bathrooms, nice touch) the first day we arrived we took advantage of the free bike rental the hostel offered and cycled to the local beach and harbour which was lovely and we also went into the main street in Ballard for some food at hamburger harrys! free drink and fries refills made paul very happy! that evening we chilled out in the tv room and spoke to some of the other hostellers, i impressed a new zealander by not assuming he was australian and we had an instant friend and the insider info on the north island. the second day we woke up just before the alarm as the hostel had started to wake up and breakfast was being prepared downstairs for us. We gorged on the free food and chatted to Lee the owner of the hostel who gave us the lowdown on what to see in seattle, armed with our annotated map we caught the bus into town and hit the tourist spots, but one of the coolest places we saw was the public library, the building itself was fantastic and inside was really lovely it had big open spaces and modern art installations and a really unusual automated book sorting system. We also went on an underground tour of seattle which was really interesting as seattle burned down in the late 1800's and because they had been having so many drainage problems as its built on flat seafront land they rebuilt the city on top of itself but some of the old sidewalks are still open to walk down under the new ones! we saw pioneer sq and columbus building which is one of the tallest in seattle. We walked along the waterfront to olympic sculpture park and the space needle and then headed back to Ballard for fish and chips and a bag organising session, fun.
The next day we were up super early to grab some freebie breakfast before catching the train at 9.45am, we upgraded to a sleeper car from coach so we could be refreshed and energised when we arrived in san fran as we don't have much time here and it was definately worth it. the train was amazing, all our meals were included so we were eating like kings in the posh dining car and we were also brought complimentary champers in our room! the train also had a movie theatre big enough to rival the one we went to last year in the lake district! and a wine/cheese tasting event was put on in the afternoon, all in all it was a lovely trip and the scenery on the way down was very impressive.
But as we're not going to be here long i'm going to get off and go see the sights x

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Photos

The space needle
The needle was nicely lit up in the evenings

Underground Tour
The city used to be a floor lower than it is now. They found it wasn't very good at high tide!

Salmon
Swimming up the fish ladder to get back to their original homes

Library
Modern architecture

The train to SF
It was long and tall!