Pike Place Market

I needed to get out of my apartment today, it's 80 degrees and perfect and given to my own devices I would have spent the day watching TV in the background and reading. Hardly the stuff of legend I know. I decided to walk down to Pike place and wander the shops and people watch. I'd walked throught the market before but never on a weekend morning and it's nuts. There are thousands of people wandering around and the smells are amazing. I am a massive fan of the market, now I know what the Milwaukee Public Market is trying to be and the light years it has to go before it gets there. The first Starbucks doesn't look like anything special but the line of people waiting to go inside was very long. The Russian bakery was delicisous smelling and it reminding of the Drake bakery as a kid so I ended up buying some sort of Apple Cinnamon role. It was worth every penny. The other thing worth mentioning about the market is the enormity of the place - it is huge and there are all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies.

I got tired of wandering through the crowds after a couple of hours so I walked along Elliot Ave to the Seattle Art Museums sculpture park. Seattle took a few acres of waterfront space and set up a sculpture park. There are maybe 20 - 30 pieces of art and a lot of native grasses and garden work planted as well. Pretty Spartan approach but I prefer that to overwhelming the space by crowding the pieces.

If you stay along the water you cross some train tracks and end up in a different park. Not thinking about the tracks it took me nearly a mile before I found a place where I could cross back over the tracks. It did end up taking me by some grain loading pier on Puget Sound. They load massive ocean going ships with grain from this pier but it is absolutely dust free - very strange to know you're around millions of bushels of grain with zero dust in the air. Long walk home but it was a good exploratory walk. Tomorrow I think I'll tackle Ballard or the U district to see what I can find.