July 3, 2001: Revelstoke and Vancouver, British Columbia
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We leave Seattle today- about five in the afternoon. So we won't have time to do anything extensive, particularly since we're starting out way north in Bellingham. But we at least want to visit the Space Needle, which I think is something Fred should see. I think I may have visited it once between my stop here in 1969 on my way to Korea and now.

Bellingham to the Space Needle/Pacific Park

We had some breakfast near the motel in Bellingham and were on our way down to Seattle about ten. I pretty much knew the way from Bellingham to the Space Needle, having been to Seattle a few times on business. We simply drove down I-5 towards Seattle. North of town, there is a new bypass, the I-405, but we continued on I-5 right into downtown Seattle.

Our Drive to Seattle

Getting to Pacific Park

As I thought, there were some signs directing people to Pacific Park, although by the time you get to where you have to exit from I-5, you can see the thing sticking up into the sky. We parked a few blocks away and walked towards the Space Needle and the Park.

The Seattle Space Needle

The Space Needle observation tower is a landmark of the Pacific Northwest, and a symbol of Seattle. Built in the Seattle Center for the 1962 World's Fair, it was once the tallest structure west of the Mississippi River (605 feet high). While it may look fragile, it was built to withstand 200 MPH winds and 9.1 magnitude earthquakes. It also has 25 lightning rods.

The observation deck is 520 ft up the structure, and there is a rotating restaurant just below it. From the top of the Needle, one can see not only the downtown Seattle skyline but also the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier (in a remarkably good picture that Fred took) and Mount Baker, as well as Elliott Bay and the surrounding islands. There is a bank of elevators to take visitors to the top in a 41-second, 10MPH trip. On April 19, 1999, the city's Landmarks Preservation Board designated it a historic landmark.

The architecture of the Space Needle is the result of a compromise between two designs- one, a giant balloon tethered to the ground and the other, a flying saucer. Yet a third designer contributed the hourglass profile. You can use the clickable thumbnails at left to see three more ground-level pictures we took of the Needle. For decades, the "hovering disk" of the Space Needle was home to two restaurants, but these were closed in 2000 to make way for SkyCity, a larger restaurant that features Pacific Northwest cuisine (and rotates 360 degrees in exactly forty-seven minutes).

Construction of the Space Needle was delayed because of difficulty locating an appropriate plot of land within the upcoming World's Fair site; when the location was finally acquired, only one year remained before the World's Fair would begin. The privately built and financed Needle was built by a construction team working around the clock. The foundation is a block of concrete built below ground level. The block is 30 feet by 120 feet, weighing 6000 tons (including 250 tons of reinforcing steel), and requiring 500 concrete trucks a full day to fill. The structure is bolted to the foundation with 72 bolts, each one 30 ft long.

The domed top is so perfectly balanced that it requires a motor the size of an average garbage disposal to turn it. Even with all of the over-engineering, the Needle was completed on time, in April 1962, at a cost of $4.5 million. The Skyline, a banquet facility, was added at the 100-foot level in 1982. Renovations were completed in 2000 that cost approximately the same as the original construction original price ($21 million in current currency).

The Seattle Skyline from the Space Needle

Of course, the first thing I wanted us to do was to go to the top of the Needle; we were lucky in that the line was less than a half-hour long (it can be 90 minutes or more in the summer). This would be my second time to the top, the last one being in 1969. I remembered some of the pictures I took then, and I duplicated a few of them now, such as this picture that looks down to the Pacific Science Center. Use the clickable thumbnails below to see the other pictures that we took from here at the top of the Space Needle:

Being at the top of the Space Needle was as interesting as I remembered it, and I think Fred was impressed as well. We went back down to ground level and walked over to the Pacific Science Center and its beautiful filigreed arches. The Science Center is a museum, and if we'd been here all day, we probably would have gone in. Instead, we walked over to the huge dome fountain between the Science Center and the Needle to have a look. It was one of the largest fountains I'd seen in a long time, and while we were standing by it, Fred took a picture with me and the fountain as well; you can see that picture here. Actually, the little park north of the Needle was quite nice, decorated with hanging baskets and with lots of plants and flowers around.

In the scrollable window below there is an aerial view of Pacific Center and the major features that we stopped at while we were here.

We happened to be walking through the park east of the Needle when we saw the monorail train coming along north towards the station that was part of the EMP Museum complex a block east of the Needle. The Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum (which we did not have time to go in) is a nonprofit museum, dedicated to contemporary popular culture, founded by Paul Allen in 2000. It is now, apparently, simply called the "EMP Museum" and it sponsors exhibits and public programs devoted to popular music. It also sponsors a yearly festival of science fiction films.

On the Seattle Center Monorail

We decided to have a ride on the monorail, so we entered the station and bought a couple of tickets. The monorail travels for about a mile and a half down to the center of Seattle, and is presumably used to shuttle people from downtown to the Seattle Center area. We enjoyed the ride downtown and back and took a number of pictures. There are clickable thumbnails for them below:

We returned to Seattle Center on the monorail and were walking back to the car when we passed a statue of Chief Seattle in a little square. Wrapped in a stained copper shawl, the chief, for whom the city is named, stands on a pedestal with one arm raised in symbolic greeting to the first white settlers who landed at Alki Point in 1851. Bear heads at the base of the pedestal spout streams of water into a pool.

The little square is called "Tilikum Place," that name meaning "welcome" or "greetings" in Chinook jargon, and is at the juncture of the original land claims of Denny, Boren, and Bell. The statue, sculpted by James Wehn from the only existing photo of the chief, was unveiled on Founders' Day, November 13, 1912, by Chief Seattle's great-great-granddaughter.

We had some time, so I thought I would take Fred to another place I'd been before- the piece of land that sticks up into Elliott Bay known as West Seattle. From there, one gets excellent views looking across the water to the city:

The City from West Seattle

The view is really quite beautiful from here, and I understand that this area is a desirable place to live- for both the views and the seclusion yet closeness to the city.

At right are clickable thumbnails for three other of the pictures we took of the city of Seattle as seen from West Seattle. This was the last stop today and, of course, the last stop on our week-long trip to the Pacific Northwest. From West Seattle, we drove back to I-5 and south to Sea-Tac Airport. There, we turned in the rental car and made our way to the terminal and our gate for our American flight home.

These weren't the last pictures we took, though. We both still had some pictures left on our film rolls, so we used them up on the flight home.

It might help you orient yourself in some of the pictures we took from our window if I show you the route the plane took in climbing out of the Seattle area and heading down to Dallas. We took off to the north, and immediately had great views of Elliott Bay and the islands beyond. Then we flew just east of West Seattle:

The West Seattle Bridge/West Seattle

I thought this was a fortuitous picture, for you can easily see the West Seattle Bridge that we had driven across two hours earlier, as well as the coast road curving around to the right. We had stopped to take our earlier pictures along the nearest stretch of shoreline. The plane banked to head back south and off to the left we could see Mercer Island.

Mt. Rainier

Then we got a real treat. As the plane was banking, we could squeeze over to the window and, far ahead, see the snow-capped peak of Mt. Rainier. I supposed that the plane would start heading east, so that Mt. Rainier would be on the opposite side of the plane, but, instead, the plane banked again and we headed due south, putting the mountain right outside our own window. That's when we got the picture at left. In that picture, and in a second excellent picture of the mountain that you can see here, you can not only see Mt. Rainier, but also Mt. Baker off in the distance to the north-northeast.

The plane banked right around to the south of Mt. Rainier National Park, and before it slipped out of view, we got one more very nice picture of snow-capped Mt. Rainier.

That was about it for picture-taking. Fred had a few more shots left, and so as we flew home, he used them up. Most of them were hazy, and really not worth including here, but he did get one nice shot as we flew over the Rocky Mountains west of Denver.

The rest of the flight was pleasant, if uneventful, and we reached home in plenty of time for Fred to get on back to Van Alstyne in preparation for going in to work tomorrow. This was a really neat trip- particularly the whole "snow in July" aspect.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	July 3, 2001: Revelstoke and Vancouver, British Columbia
	Return to the Index for Our Canada Trip