Seattle and Western Washington

In Spring 1995 I was for a few days in Seattle for work and attached some vacation to that to see some more of the city and for touring around a bit in Western Washington.

Here is an overview of downtown Seattle from the waterfront side.

From the previous picture you might wonder if the space needle is really only so small, but that is because there it is well behind the downtown area. From underneath it looks real tall.

In the Netherlands we have street markets everywhere, but in Seattle it is a major tourist attraction. But they sell lots of good fish.

The most amazing thing of Seattle to my opinion is underground. Around the time Seattle was growing out to be come an important city, the inhabitants thought they had too much trouble from incoming seawater causing floods and problems with the sewage system. They came up with an amazing solution: to lift up the street level up to one story higher than the original ground floor. If you wouldn't you, you would never see it, but there are now excursions to the original ground floor level.

Around the city of Seattle there is an absolutely beautiful scenery. Even when they do something as 'environmentally incorrect' as making reservoirs, it still looks gorgeous.

Real mountains are not so far from the city. (We don't have them in the Netherlands.) Here are some of them on the Olympic Peninsula. I couldn't catch Mt Rainier well on a picture, but when the weather is right (which is not often the case I was told) there is a beautiful view on the volcano already from within Seattle.

All the mountains gather lots of water.

All that water is causing a rare phenomenon: a rain forest in a moderate climate.