Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Pacific Northwest - Seattle Day 2

The second day (Friday, July 29) began with me and the girls running to Safeway for some doughnuts and other essential snacks. We ate our doughnuts at the hotel before getting ready for another big day.

We started the morning off with a gorgeous picture of pregnant Alison in front of her favorite skulls - those of the infamous Tyrannosaurus Rex, aka T-Rex, Rex, etc. Obviously, our first attraction of the day was the Pacific Science Center at the Seattle Center.

Our visit to the Science Center started off in the dinosaur room before moving to the...
Space and astronomy area. The girls enjoyed the planetarium show geared specifically for preschoolers. After that, we spent some time in the kids play area before making our way over to...
The bug and insect area. One of Ada's favorite attractions of the day was the...
LinkButterfly House. We got to see a ton of beautiful butterflies. Unfortunately none of them landed on Ada, but she was able to catch this great shot of one of them on me. Good balance, great composition, decent color - well done Ada.

We had a picnic lunch of potato chips before watching the lovely documentary Born to be Wild in 3D IMAX, after which we headed over to the Space Needle. We were walking through the plaza of the Pacific Science Center and many of the water features and little pools were drained as they were being worked on. There was a loose-chain barrier around the edges of the walkways and Ada was walking with us but staring up at an exhibit on the upper level. She didn't see the loose-chain barrier before walking right through it and falling face first onto the concrete about 30-36" below. Luckily she wasn't hurt, just extremely embarrassed more than anything. It made a loud crashing noise as the loose-chain posts and everything tipped over and crashed to the ground. We felt so bad for the poor girl.
Ada was still a little sad from her earlier mishap.
The line to go up the Space Needle was just over an hour, which is surprising considering the Space Needle is only the 7th tallest building in Seattle anymore.
We enjoyed the views from the top, but in my mind its one of those things that you've only got to do once in life. After the Space Needle we had dinner at McDonald's before driving across town to Safeco Field to watch the Mariners take on the Devil Rays. We had planned on just scalping cheap tickets to the game, but this strategy was deeply flawed. I had expected there to be a glutton of tickets as the Mariners had lost the previous 17 straight games. But, the cheapest three ticket levels were all sold out, the scalpers were not selling anything cheap and we were stuck paying face-value for much better tickets than we had planned on (to add insult to injury, the scalper said if we came on Monday night he could get us $20-$30 tickets for $5 each). The crowds must have been drawn by Sonics Appreciation Night.
They had all of the Sonics greats back to celebrate including Lenny Wilkins, George Karl, Detlef Schrempf, Gary Payton, Shawn Kemp, Tom Chambers, Nate McMillan, Dale Ellis, Hersey Hawkins, etc. It seemed that half the crowd was there wearing Sonics jerseys in celebration.


Kate and Ada do well at the ball games for the first inning or two (then we give them our cell phones to play with...).
We sat high up in the upper deck directly behind home plate.
This was Alison's eighth MLB stadium and my fourteenth. We hope to add one more each before summer is over.

2 comments:

Tim said...

Sounds like a fun Vacation so far. You can only put me down for one MLB stadium..... None other than Busch Stadium. That is a pretty cool idea I must say.

Rachelle said...

Hey, I think your getting better at updating your blog. What a great vacation! Cute pics of the fam.