Noodling (and Needling) Around Seattle

Returning to our Seattle vacation, Monday was our most conventionally "tourist" day of the trip.

We began the morning with a trip to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery, a special (huge) location of the ubiquitous coffee shop chain that offered uncommon blends and a view of coffee beans being roasted and scooped away in a machine for packaging. It's still Starbucks, so to my taste buds it still seemed burnt, but it was a fun spectacle nevertheless.

From there, we moved on to the Museum of Pop Culture (or MoPOP), a three-story collection of items from movies, television, and music. We spent hours looking at costumes and props from Star Trek, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, the Marvel movies, the Alien franchise, The Princess Bride, The Lord of the Rings, Halloween, Back to the Future... the list goes on and on. We toured a room stuffed with Nirvana memorabilia, guided by a woman who knows more about Nirvana than I do about all rock bands. The museum was a fun mix of things that impressed in person and things surprisingly less stunning than the efforts of cos-players.

MoPOP stands right in the shadow of the Space Needle, and that's where we headed next. It was another uncharacteristically clear day in Seattle, so the view was lovely -- from Puget Sound to Mount Rainier to the downtown skyline. We walked over the newly-installed transparent floor of the slowly revolving platform at the top, and experienced the vertigo of looking 600 feet straight down.

Also in the shadow of the Space Needle is the Chihuly Garden and Glass, a sort of mini-art museum for famed glass maker Dale Chihuly. If you've ever looked up at the ceiling in the lobby at Bellagio in Las Vegas, you've seen his work. Another massive tower of his rises through the center of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. But this Seattle studio is a large exhibit of his colorful, eye-catching work. Snaking both indoors and out, you get to take in a variety of his unusual work.

All this took us well into the afternoon, and by then we were ready for a drink. We hit Number 6 Cider first, and then Schilling Cider over in the Fremont area. Schilling in particular was a fun stop, as they had 32 taps of cider, both theirs and other makers'. No, we didn't sample everything, of course. But we found plenty to like. (Schilling was also near a curious sculpture underneath a freeway bridge, the hulking Fremont Troll.)

For dinner, we once again sought out seafood, hitting Duke's Seafood and Chowder. The chowder was great, and the crab and cheese stuffed prawns I had even better.

It was the most packed day of the trip, and tons of fun.