Day Two Seattle

Seattle is a very pretty city. We took a three hour tour of the city today led by a very sociable fellow as our driver. We found out that there are only two seasons in Seattle. They are the sunny season which goes for about six weeks from July fourth until mid august and the rainy/cloudy season which goes for the rest of the year. Some people call the fine season the construction season. Apparently only forty inches of rain falls in Seattle in one year but since most of it is drizzle the skies are usually cloudy. We had great weather today..the bluest skies you have ever seen are in Seattle.

There are four Boeing aircraft factories in the city and one has the biggest building in the USA. Seattle is the home of Starbucks. The head office is here and there are seven hundred stores here. They say that if you throw a stone anywhere in Seattle you will hit a Starbucks store.. That is amazing since there are only seven hundred thousand people in the metropolitan area and four million  in all of Seattle.
Seattle is the closest port to China in the USA. The famous shopping area near the port is pike markets which is the oldest fresh food markets in USA. Huge bunches of fresh flowers were only ten dollars. The markets were started by Japanese and Vietnamese farmers in the early nineteen hundreds so that the farmers could sell directly to the public.
Ups united states postal service started in Seattle for all of you who buy direct from the USA. They transported goods needed by the miners in the gold rush in the Klondike area in Alaska. The postal service started with only two bicycles and now it has jets as well as trucks etc.
Seattle was the birth place of Bill Gates, Jimmy Hendrix and the Seahawks gridiron team, the Sounders soccer team and the Sonics basketball team but that team was sold to another city so there is no team here at the moment. The stadium that the sea hawks use is called century link field and it was designed so that the people in the city can hear the fans in the stadium when games are on.  The mariners baseball stadium has a retractable roof which retracts in only ten mins. They needed the roof due to the number of rainy days... We were so lucky with the weather today.

From Queen Anne lookout we could see the city, the sky tower which was built for the world expo held here in sixty two, Rainier mountain with its snow cap and the fantastic blue skies is Seattle. Then we went to Commodore park to watch the boats go through the locks to go from the fresh water of the lakes to the salt water of the sound. They have built a special area so that the salmon can still swim upstream. The locks work the same way as the Panama canal locks do.

Luckily we were not here in June because about three hundred naked cyclists ride through Fremont in the Fremont solstice parade. Really they are not totally naked, they wear helmets. Some of them paint their bodies so maybe the guy who ran onto the field in the last state of origin would be welcome.
We took the monorail from the sky tower to the city centre, had a delicious chicken philly sub for lunch. After a walk down to the public markets to see the world famous fish market we caught the light rail back to our hotel so we have had a great day, seen fantastic scenery, met some police on horseback, used many forms of transport and we thoroughly enjoyed Seattle.