Crowne Plaza Hotel Seattle-Downtown Area, Wa

Well.....after a late start due to Dad's need to watch some British Open golf....we headed out for Seattle. Derek's plan was to stop for lunch somewhere in Oregon or Washington, so with that narrowed list of possible lunch places, we ended up on Centralia, WA. Derek had to choice between Arby's and Country Cousins.....and Country Cousins won out. Very good. After checking in, Derek allowed Mom to fit some shopping into his busy schedule, so we visited Nordstroms, Macy's and various other stor...

The first full day of the trip had us off to Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. We got there early and with the overcast skies, the animals were very active. Highlights were the Grizzly Bears and Wolfs. After a good 5 hours at the zoo we headed back to the motel for a quick nap. We decided to walk to the ball park since it was only 1.5 miles and all downhill The concern was the trip back, but we were going to cross that bridge after the game. The game.....well it was a game of highlights. First of ...

Note to self: buy city maps in addition to state maps. We got into the city easy enough, but downtown Seattle isn't exactly easy to navigate. Only the avenues are numbered: the streets are instead named (pet peeve #1 of city navigation), and the roads are so narrow I'd lose my mirrors if my truck were any lower. But after wandering around ignoring the GPS, which didn't even place us on the right side of the interstate, we found ourselves being approached by a valet. Figuring he had a better ...

What to say? The expo was pretty cool. I picked up a few music CDs from the likes of Freezepop, The OneUps, and the Minibosses, as well as various game demos that don't run on my Mac. For that matter I took home a decent bag of free posters, keychains, stickers, and various other things I don't really need so I gave to Zac to give to his little cousin. Aside from all the game companies showing off and explaining their new stuff were a few independent developers trying to get into the industr...

I was woken outrageously early this morning by my roommate, who inexplicably had arranged a meeting at 6:30am. After she left I drew back the curtains to let the sunshine in and then went back to snooze for a while. Well, seriously, that was the only option at that time of the morning! I got up properly at around 9am and went and had a shower and got ready to start my day. The first thing I decided to do was to head over to the convention center and pick up my badge and conference kit. The co...

One again my roommate had an alarm call at an early hour, thus waking me up before I was really ready to be woken. I ended up putting on the radio and just chilling to some music for a couple of hours whilst deciding what to do with myself. I left the room at around 10:30am and headed down to Pike Place Market. The market is huge, on multiple floors and sells all manner of everything. A lot of people were congregating around the fresh fish stalls, no doubt looking for something good for dinne...

The flight departed on time and I was sat next to a group of young boys. Fortunately they were quite well-behaved and slept most of the journey. I watched 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' - kind of a kid's fantasy but it was quite good. Lunch came round then (one of those pizza roll-type things). The view on this flight was amazing, especially over the mountains in Montana and then Washington. I was aware Mt Rainier was a big mountain but I wasn't prepared for quite how big it actually was when we...

I'd never been to Seattle before, but having come of age as the grunge scene rose to national prominence, it had always been on my list of cities to visit. My flight arrived as the sun was setting and it made for a breathtaking arrival; the setting sun illuminated the sky in shades of pink, the backdrop for Mt. Rainier. And trees! Green, green trees.

Sadly, no pictures, as I was seated on the aisle.