Chraela,  In My Life,  Seattle/Disneyland - April 2016,  Travel

Seattle/Disneyland Trip – Day 1!

This is the first post in a series about our trip to Seattle and Disneyland in April 2016. All the posts about our trip will be listed here! This is Day 1.

Our vacation to the west coast is something I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about, just because it will probably take a long time to finish. But it’s definitely something I want to remember…so here we are! It was our first time to Seattle AND Disneyland, Chris’s first time on the west coast, and our first “big” vacation together! It was such an amazing time and I’m so excited to write about it and relive it <3

Before we start, something to note while reading this series is that to me, there is a significant difference between a “vacation” and a “trip”. This was definitely a TRIP. When I travel I like to pack as many things as possible into the time we have and see/do as MUCH as we can. You can expect to see that reflected in each post…hopefully they won’t be too scatterbrained as I try to fit everything in and keep it interesting 😉

Our adventure starts on Tuesday, April 19….

Armed with our luggage and my extensive trip spreadsheet, we were up bright and early to head to the airport and get going! It was like 6am and we were excited but you can see the tired in our eyes haha

After waiting in a Starbucks line that was literally longer than our security line, we were on the way to our gate and soon on the plane!

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I promise Chris was more excited than he appears here.

Soon we were on our way. The flight was pleasant and actually went by really quickly. I made the most of my time with some Hamilton and a grapes and cheese plate while Chris was snoozing:

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Passport for aesthetic purposes only. Also RIP those sunglasses, which have died since this photo was taken.

And after a few hours, we were seeing these beauties out the window!

Our flight arrived around 10:30am Seattle time. For those who don’t know, my two older sisters and younger brother all live in Seattle. Both Chris and I were interested in visiting the city and being able to visit my family definitely gave us a good excuse to go! We were super excited to see them and check out Seattle from the perspective of “the locals”. So you’ll see them in some of my photos too!

My brother picked us up from the airport and we headed to their place (where we were staying) to settle in. Chris and I were tired, but we refused to nap!!!!! We wanted to stay up and get adjusted to west coast time. We took a little walk around the neighborhood to wake ourselves up. We quickly learned that Seattle is BEAUTIFUL:

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my sister turned our walk into a cute photoshoot! there are more photos of hers in this post as well – basically all the ones that are better than iphone quality are hers haha. this is a shameless promo for her photography as well!!! check out her website and instagram – she is amazing!!

After changing into some fresh I-didn’t-wear-this-on-an-airplane clothes, they took us to one of their favorite local restaurants called Pho on 44th. Here we had our first Seattle meal!

It was a cute little Vietnamese restaurant. I was excited to try pho (it’s pronounced like fuh) which is that soupy looking dish up there, but it was actually so hard to eat and everybody laughed at me!!!!

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It was a struggle.

I’m not sure how you’re supposed to eat soup with chopsticks but ok!!! Chris got that second dish up there, which if I remember right was just a teriyaki chicken or something. Chris is obviously less of an adventurous eater than me.

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Shoutout to my sister again for this one. Her food photos are exquisite.

After lunch we went to check out downtown Seattle. It was so fun having my siblings as tour guides! My family loves to travel and it was fun being together with them again. Walking through downtown Seattle was so cute and fun! I love big cities because of the culture and Seattle did not disappoint. This was the outside of a bookstore which I quickly recognized as a very instagramable background:

We’re not models, the camera just went off.

We stopped by a very cute gelato place called Fainting Goat. I had an equally cute cup of Stracciatella gelato.

My sister caught me in action photographing:

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Our friendly tour guides then took us to see the Fremont Troll:

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This was such a trip lol if you’re unfamiliar, the Fremont Troll is a public sculpture/art piece under a bridge in Seattle. It’s literally a troll under a bridge!! You can get an idea of what I mean in this photo – the troll is up at the top of the hill, under that overpass:

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The neighborhood of Fremont is really artsy and the troll was made years ago in an attempt to bring more character to the area. You may also recognize it from that scene in 10 Things I Hate About You. Here is my brother, under the troll’s hand hahahah

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There are lots of other cool sculptures and things in the neighborhood, too:

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After we got our fill of troll-climbing, we headed into the city proper to be real tourists. Everyone who goes to Seattle has heard about the Space Needle, but we had been recommended another, supposedly better, observatory – the Sky View Observatory at Columbia Center. I was told by my whole family (including my parents, who had visited Seattle a few months prior) that the Columbia tower was taller and better than the Space Needle. Space Needle tickets are also like $40 and I had managed to score a groupon for the Columbia Tower that ended up costing us like $6 each….so we were off to the Columbia Tower!

Something important to note about this is that Chris has a fear of heights. What a nice girlfriend I was to plan a visit to the tallest building in the state of Washington! 🙂 But my siblings promised that it wasn’t bad if you stood far away from the windows, so Chris agreed to give it a shot. I think we were both glad we went when we got to the top and saw this:

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The view from the top was AMAZING!!! You could see the entire city in every direction.

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The coolest part was that if you looked in one direction you could see water for miles and miles, but if you walked to the other side of the building you could see beautiful mountains!

In that second pic you can also see the stadium where the Seattle Seahawks play. Chris thought it was cool because he likes football, and I thought it was cool because Russell Wilson looks like a cute puppy.

We were really lucky that we went on a clear day, and we could clearly see the stunning Mount Rainier:

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It was so cool. Chris and my sisters also snapped some sneaky pics of me:

Chris’s picture actually started a trend for the trip where every day he posted a pic on instagram that he had sneakily taken of me. It was actually pretty cute. #chraela

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You can even see how tiny the Space Needle looks in the distance hehe 😉 I would REALLY recommend the Sky View Observatory if you’re visiting Seattle. The inside was really cute too, with interesting facts about the city on the walls and lots of chairs to sit and relax.

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Pay no attention to my murderous look here.

There was also a lot of space to walk around in front of the windows, which was helpful for when Chris got anxious about standing too close to the windows and wanted some space haha

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We ended up utilizing the chairs and tables inside to do a self-timer and get a photo of all of us – when you view this photo, please also imagine in your mind’s eye the image of the 5 of us running to pose in the frame before the camera went off:

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Yay family!

It was really pleasant and quiet up there and I’m really glad we got to see it <3

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A nerdy, artistic shadow photo of us. Featuring Chris’s shadow towering over all of us.

Once we were done looking out for miles over Seattle, we moseyed around the inside of the Columbia Center some more. The lobby was very charming and my sister took some model pics of us:

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one of my favs from the trip!!

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We hung out in there for a while. I can’t resist a good chair.

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And here’s Lukas and Chris pretending they’re in an important business meeting hahaha

After this to complete our first day tour of Seattle, my siblings took me to a cute local park called Gas Works Park. The location used to be an old coal gas plant, and the remaining parts of that are scattered throughout the park.

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It also has a BEAUTIFUL !!!!! view of the Seattle skyline:

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My sister’s love for panoramas shines through here

It was such a nice area. and there were TONS OF DOGS!! at one point we literally walked past a pen of puppies that people had there just to pet and play with. It was heavenly. I found that Seattle is a very dog-friendly city.

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It was seriously so pretty. If I lived there, I could definitely see myself hanging out in areas like this a lot.

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We chose to ask someone to take the photo for us this time instead of carefully propping the camera up on our surroundings haha

By this time it was getting a bit later, and we decided to head back closer to my sister’s house for some dinner. She mentioned a place that had truffle fries – I was sold. We had dinner at a cute place called B3 Breakfast & Burger Bar. I got those truffle fries and a delicious andouille mac & cheese, and Chris had a burger.

Here you can really tell which photo was taken with a professional camera and which was taken with an iphone hahaa

By this time, Chris and I were BEYOND tired – we had been awake for like 20 hours at this point. We had such a great time on our first day in Seattle and had even more amazing things planned for the rest of our time there. And honestly it wouldn’t be a vacation with my family if we didn’t cram our days full of things to do until we were pooped, so I considered our first day a success!

I hope you enjoyed the recap of our first day of vacation!! Hopefully it wasn’t too long and you made it to the end 🙂 I have tons more photos and fun things to share so I hope you’ll come back to read about the rest of the trip! <3

xo, kaela

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