What Ana Does

What a day! We started our morning at Pikes Place Market, a long 2-block hallway of grocery, fish and craft shops. Starving, I picked up a cinnamon roll and Dave got a pumpkin cookie. We headed to the world famous stall to watch them throw fish. We were not disappointed. It was pretty cool. They were giving out smoked salmon which the girls tried and Leah loved. That made me think of lox, so I easily found a bagel place where I could get lox and cream cheese bagel. Yum! We meandered down the other fantastic stalls in the Pike's Place Market -- lots of grocery items and crafty things. I loved it. This is where my crush on Seattle started. After leaving the market, we started to meander toward the Experience Music Projects -- which is Dave's Mecca. The walk got too long and he got too impatient, so we hailed a cab for the rest of the way there. OK, the EMP is seriously awesome. The kids loved it, we loved it. We played, we laughed, we sat for a while and watched video...

We wanted to be on the road as early as we could, so we packed up the rental car said our good byes to Joe, Rachel and a sleepy Atticus and headed out. But first a breakfast stop at The Tin Shed, a Diners Drive-ins and Dives-featured restaurant that was on David's Must Do list. And it was amazingly good. The biscuits! Don't get me started. It's a three-hour drive to Seattle from Portland, with little in-between, so we made it by 11am. We checked into our hotel and explored the area. We found the downtown shopping area and the Niketown -- as we do in most big cities first -- and plotted the rest of our trip.  We picked a restaurant down by the Public Market called Pike's Pub and weren't overly impressed by it. But the girls ate salmon and loved it -- so they said, so a good start for them.  Seattle isn't at all what I had expected. It's hilly and not that closely tied to the water (there's a highway in-between). I thought we'd be surrounde...