This morning as we drove to catch the light rail, we heard a thumpety-thump. We had a flat tire. Triple A said our wait would be an hour and a half so Bob decided to switch to the spare himself with the help of a random, kind stranger. Luck was with us as there was a tire shop near our hotel..The man there fixed the tire and put it back on and charged ten dollars! What good people. The other travel travail is that we've walked so much in the last two days that I wore a hole in one of my runners.
Bob says it will be good for another three months. Rob would wear it for another year, but I will turn it into a gardening shoe as soon as we are home.
The senior satisfaction was that I claimed a senior discount for the first time in my life. At the Sky View Observatory I was legitimately senior as seniors start at age 55. I may have to frame the ticket!
Here's the poster that accosted my eyes on the light rail today.
We learned a lot of Seattle history when we took an underground tour in the Pioneer District.
We stopped at Luigi Italian for some map reading and some drink & food.
From lunch we walked to Columbia Tower & went up to the 73rd floor for the Sky View Observatory. The views were impressive.
Going down, we stopped on the 40th floor for Starbucks in the highest Starbucks in the world. Bob thinks this was his inaugural stop in a Starbucks. We learned that the two busiest Starbucks in the world at in Beijing and at Times Square in Manhattan. Elizabeth aka Liz, that would be the one kitty corner from the Edison. We also learned that there are 18,000 Starbucks worldwide ... I think they stand corrected as the new Weyburn Starbucks isn't in that number.
Besides Starbucks, other companies that came out of Seattle are Expedia, Boeing, Nordstrom, Costco, Eddie Bauer, and Amazon.
My favorite librarian Glenda (yes, not Kam Tao) told us to check out the main public library branch in Seattle. She didn't steer us wrong. The architecture is incredible.
We went up to the 10th floor so we could look down to the bottom.
This library has a gift shop that rivals the one in the NYC main library.
However, here's my favorite part of the library.
I want this woman's job! She sits there and tries to help people find books that will interest them. She does this by asking certain key questions about their likes and dislikes. She's holding a bookmark that can direct me to their site which can do the same thing for me electronically. I'm definitely going to use the service. She also gave some ideas to bring home to our adult programmer.
With all this done, we still had time for sightseeing.
We went to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor Center. It's of great interest to us because their foundation is joined to Rotary and other organizations in the goal to eradicate polio from this earth. The Center told that story, but many others too. I picked up lots of info that would make a good Rotary presentation. God bless philanthropists like the Gates.
Even the bathrooms were educational. Each door showed bathroom conditions in various countries. 2.5 billion (yes, billion) have no access to any form of bathroom or latrine.
We had time for one last thing before it was time to end our day. We picked the epic ferris wheel to enjoy more glorious views.
Seattle is thriving. Note the building cranes in the next photo. 20% of all cranes in the US
are presently .in Seattle.
Tomorrow we head back to Canada to unite with our favorite Chemainiac.
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