May 17 2009
Family Vacation: Seattle, WA
Last weekend, my wife and I took our kids on a mini-vacation. Call it guilt or whatever you like, but we figured that if my wife and I could take a six day vacation with just ourselves, our kids deserved a little away time too.
With only having a couple days to go away, we decided to drive down to Seattle for the weekend. It had been a few years since we had been there and we figured that we’d do the tourist thing for a couple days.
Despite how close it is to Vancouver, I’ve been to Seattle twice and my wife once. We haven’t done a lot of sightseeing there, so this time, we were really going to try.
We stayed at the Springhill Suites by Marriott (I’ll leave our issues with them out of this!) which is in the downtown area. After checking in, we had promised the kids that we would take them on a double decker bus tour. My wife and I went on one in San Francisco back in March and found it interesting to see the city and some of the sights that we may want to check out. But in Seattle, the 45 minute tour was lack-lustre. Okay.. it was boring. Their were a few interesting things, but I wasn’t “wowed” with Seattle.
Throughout the weekend, we briefly went to Pike Place Market, walked along the piers, took the kids to Woodland Park Zoo, and even went up the Space Needle. The zoo was amazing as always and the Space Needle was expensive (as expected), but the rest of the city doesn’t seem to have a lot to offer. And in the city where Starbucks started, try finding one open on a Sunday morning! And one of our kids started getting a fever (and subsequently sick), what is with the drug store that was open, but with no children’s Tylenol. YOU’RE A FREAKIN’ DRUG STORE!
All in all, the kids seemed to have fun, for the most part. But Seattle left my wife and I with the same impression.
It’s just not a tourist-friendly place.