The lightship Swiftsure is retired at the Northwest Seaport in Seattle. She was launched in 1904 and worked on the west coast at various places as a lightship for 56 years and was retired from service in 1960.
During World War II she worked for the Coast Guard challenging vessels trying to enter San Francisco Bay.
She is looking good and is still afloat in her retirement and is a National Historic Landmark.
We saw a lot of great stuff on our family vacation to Seattle last summer. We were at the Ballard Locks checking things out when a group of Standup Paddleboarders came cruising by. They made it looked very easy.
This week’s prompts were challenging for me, which makes it fun!
1. Missing
One of my obsessions is geocaching that is a sport where people hide caches out in various locations and post the GPS coordinates on geocaching.com. Others go find the caches and log both a paper log in the cache and the online cache page. Sometimes I end up in creepy places like this long abandoned roadway near Tulsa. I walked down this road about a mile to the cache. This looked like a great place to go missing. Of course, not a soul knew that I was out there. If something happened to me it might a while before somebody found me.
2. Numbers
Good old number 103!
3. Purple
Christmas lights on Oklahoma City’s canal in the Bricktown area.
4. Music
A guitar tower at Seattle’s Experience Music Project. Talk about overwhelming. That was EMP.
5. Bracelet
26,000+ photos on Flickr that I’ve posted and not one bracelet tag so I’m cheating. This was my mother’s turquoise and silver handcrafted necklaces. Mom is gone and Dad gave me her necklace. I remember the day way back when Dad gave it to her. It was a great day for both of them.
You know I’m almost embarrassed by how much I’ve been posting about our family vacation to Seattle. Almost but not quite. It is hard to embarrass me. I’m a Dallas Cowboy fan. If that doesn’t embarrass somebody to admit that then nothing will. Seattle is such a great city and there is such a lot to see and do and we were on the go morning, noon, and night. We had a great time but we were exhausted. Next year, we are going to the beach and planting our little butts down.
The Underground Seattle Tour is in the oldest part of Seattle near what is called Pioneer Square. Pioneer Square is a funky little area that is still struggling. I love the mix of the old and seedy with the new and seedy.
SuperPizzaBoy loved it to. He’s a city kid but he has never been around pigeons too much. I think pigeons are rats with wings but SPB loved them. He chased them all over the square waiting for our tour to start.
The guides of the Underground Seattle Tour had a long and confusing story about early Seattle’s need for redoing their sewer system and the the graft and corruption that went on. The basic thing is that the city decided that they needed to raise street level by one building story. So all the sidewalks and first floors became underground and forgotten for a long time.
The new street level was made and the buildings took second level windows and made street level entrances and built new sidewalks over the old sidewalks. The original building levels became basements and the original sidewalks were forgotten except by drug dealers, prostitutes, and other criminals.
After the orientation tour they guides take us on a tour of the complex of sidewalks entering and exiting in obscure doorways in nasty alleys. I loved it. Above is a space that you can reserve for a wedding reception.
Above is an old skylight over one of the sidewalks.
Here is the above view. I just love this kind of stuff. I love secrets and knowing stuff that other people don’t. Downtown Tulsa has a public tunnel complex that I don’t think one person in a thousand knows about.
The tour ends at a combination gift store and museum. Above is a simple still.
I’m sure you know what this is.
Seattle Washington is a place of great natural beauty. It is also a fairly old town by western US standards and that makes for a wealth of old signs.
These old mission signs are wonderful. Talk about down and out. The mission above still seems to be operating. The sign below was displayed on the wonderful “Seattle Underground” tour.
Many of the buildings have kept their original signs like the one above.
Steam Baths have a not very nice ring to them. This is another sign you can see on the Seattle Underground Tour.
The more modern signs are wonderful. Seattle has a lot going on I loved the J&M Cafe sign above embedded in a matrix.
We didn’t eat at Cutters Crabhouse but I love the sleek modern look of it.
We saw a few of these signs around town. I love Seattle and it is a great sports town but they need to quit being whiny babies!
Oklahoma City will never give up their Thunder. Uh, at least until the next Oil Bust.
Back to Seattle, sorry. The big tourist destination on the waterfront in Seattle is Pike Street Market. It buzzes all day every day and shuts down completely at 6 PM. Everybody talks about the fish. And yes there is fish everywhere.
I loved the neon signs. They are everywhere and they are big and brash. There is lots going on so they have to be seen. No sign is seen better than a neon sign.
Chihuly Garden and Glass is in Seattle at the base of the Space Needle. It is dedicated to the glass artist Dale Chihuly and it is simply amazing. If you go make sure that you have plenty of time and that your camera is fully charged. It is simply amazing. The place is brand new and has room to grow.
We went through the galleries and gardens twice and still didn’t think we saw everything.
It’s been a month since we were in Seattle but I’m still blown away by the skies we saw there.
