Day 14 - Seattle

The Plan (the whole Plan)
Day #14 : Thu 22 May : To Victoria by ferry (a day of water)

Well, the notes from the plan, above, are no help at all to you here since, for reasons noted yesterday, we're doing it differently from now on.

Seattle was cloudy and grey.  So we resolved to spend most of the day indoors. And you can't get much more indoors than underground, so, after a brief tour of the fish market, we headed off to Seattle's underground tour.



Years ago, Seattle solved its chronic flooding problems by raising the land by the seaboard about one storey above the ground.  Trouble was, the buildings were already there: so ground floors became basements, streets were raised onto brick arches, and great chunks of the city took on a curious design.  In fact, the litany of administrative balls-ups and engineering disasters was such that we started to wonder whether ancestors of Mark and David had been responsible for the governance and the construction.  But a number of the parts of the city centre rendered subterranean by the works have survived, and the tour takes you round these.

We seriously recommend the tour, especially if you get the guides we did.  The event started off with a twenty-minute scatological history of Seattle from a guy called Rick, after which the underground walkabout began.  We were led through the cellars, basements and buried alleyways by the small but perfectly formed Krechelle, who combines a stentorian voice with an extensive repertioire of lavatory humour and appalling puns.  Returning blinking into the daylight, we had lunch at the Pike Brewery (one of Zeke's recommendations), and set about doing the rest of the obvious tourist things.
 
 

So we did the monorail....
	....and the Space Needle.

And three of us went of to the Seattle Museum of Art (where Mark bought an art book so big it's not obvious how he's going to get it back) while Rupert went off shopping to get presents for his wife and children.  But he didn't find anything.  Sorry, Lisa; sorry, kids.  I'm sure the mean old sod will get you something eventually.

Oh, and we were sufficiently impressed with the Pike Brewery that we went back.  As the evening went on, the idea of resetting Trumpton as an agitprop musical seemed to be an increasingly good idea and we ended up discussing it is some detail.  David and Rupert sorted out the set changes, Patrick had the lighting plot all worked out, while Mark was willing to take anyone interested through the music for the time-change from Mrs Honeyman's song to Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, while the politics of PC McGarry's role were ... .  Oh, dear, we promised to behave better a while ago, didn't we?  Never mind.
 

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