This is the third post in a series about our trip to Seattle and Disneyland in April 2016. All the posts about our trip will be listed here! Make sure you read Days 1 and 2 before this one 🙂 We did a lot on this day so this post will be pretty photo-heavy!!
Thursday, April 21, 2016
And so day 3 begins, and we are already on our last full day in Seattle! We’ve had such a jam-packed trip already, naturally we were not slowing down now. Today we are heading into Seattle proper again to visit Pike Place Market!
Pike Place Market is a public market and neighborhood where people sell all kinds of crafts, food, and other homemade goods. It’s one of the most popular spots in Seattle for tourists and I was so excited to check it out.
When we got there I was immediately overwhelmed with how many cool things there were to see and do! There were SO MANY little shops and cute cafes to explore. However, I’m no noob when it comes to planning, so luckily I had a few highlights picked out that I knew we wanted to check out. My sister led us to our first stop for some lunch: Pike Place Chowder!
So fun fact about me – I LOVE a good clam chowder. Honestly I love most soups. You will see a trend on this trip that I ate a LOT of soup. This little shop, Pike Place Chowder, is known for their award-winning chowders. It’s literally so good that they’ve won awards for best New England clam chowder over restaurants that are actually from New England hahaha. I was so excited to try it and I was not disappointed! It was amazing.
I also loved the sign they had for their bathroom lol. Second fact about me – I love weird and unique signs:
After a delicious lunch we went back to see all the cool things we had passed on the way (we did things kinda backwards, but it’s fine). One of the things I read about and knew I had to go see was Rachel the piggy bank:
Rachel is the mascot of the market! She’s named after a real pig AND she is a real piggy bank!! You can put in money and make a wish and everything collected goes to a food bank at the market 🙂 I thought it was so cute and had to get a photo with her:
I’m pretty sure I wished that me and Chris would get engaged and WOW look how well that worked out for me!! Clearly she has a 100% success rate!!!! Also, that fish market behind us was WILD, the guys were throwing fish around across the counter and people would gather around and watch haha
Next we took some time and strolled through the market. There was so much to look at and lots of fun things to buy. I wish I lived in Seattle because I would go here every day haha. It was so fun to just go through and peruse everything. One of the most interesting places was a stand full of different kinds of pasta:
It was the weirdest. They had super hot pepper pasta, fruity pasta, chocolate pasta?! As a pasta fan I was very impressed.
Another awesome thing was all the stands full of AMAZINGLY beautiful flowers!!!!
Omg I wish I was getting married in Seattle because they had STUNNING flowers for so cheap!! My sister told me there’s a lot of local gardeners up there so they all sell their flowers at the market for super low prices. I was in love, they were so beautiful.
Beautiful pink and purple bouquet <3
I seriously can’t even remember all the little stores we went in to. There was a place full of pet merchandise that had these great dog socks:
A store full of every type of cheese you could imagine:
There were just tons of little specialty places. People selling jams, nuts, tea, even a place selling only different types of cherries. Going by all the shops we started to get hungry and slowly began snacking. We got these AMAZING donuts from this little shop called Daily Dozen Doughnuts:
For some reason we also felt very inclined to take lots of photos of ourselves with the donuts hahaha
Now if you remember from day 2 we were very disappointed that our Seattle Restaurant Week choice was out of baklava for our dessert. Well…..at Pike Place Market we were extremely lucky to stumble upon a little Greek shop full of Mediterranean delicacies….which means Chris was able to get his baklava!!!!
Such a happy boy. The owner of the shop was hilarious too, I commented on how gigantic this piece of baklava was and she was “YES, the Greeks love to feed you!!” hahahaha
The next place on the itinerary was one of my FAVORITE stops of the whole place – this is Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, a cheesemaking kitchen and store.
Okay, so, I need to explain this. I don’t think I’ve talked about this on the blog before but I am obsessed with cheese. I consider myself a cheese connoisseur. A cheese addict. I eat cheese every day of my life. My family is full of cheese nerds too – we always would stop at little family-owned cheese shops on our road trips and get tons of cheese curds to snack on while we drive. I love cheese, ok. So it’s safe to say that this cheesy haven was a must-stop for me.
I’m literally like a child in a candy store!!! Except I’m an adult and it’s a cheese store!
I could not walk away without my own tub of cheese curds. If you’ve never had cheese curds you truly don’t know what you’re missing. The best snack in the world.
The sad part of this story is that I TRAGICALLY left my tub of cheese curds that was about 1/4 still full in my sister’s fridge when we left for the airport the next day. But we won’t focus on that.
Next on our tour was something very special and iconic for me! You may or may not be aware that Starbucks was founded in Seattle. Welllll it just so happens that the very first Starbucks store EVER is located in Pike Place Market!
It was a cute little store, kind of long and a strange shape haha. But everyone in there was so nice. Not sure if that’s because Starbucks baristas are nice or people from Seattle are nice. But they all seemed to be having a good time and really enjoying themselves. I ordered my fav, an iced caramel macchiato 😀
We got our drinks and then popped into a cute French bakery nearby:
I chose a pistachio macaron to go with my drink. We headed out to a little grassy area to enjoy our snacks!
It was a beautiful day so we also indulged in some photo taking.
Chris took a sneaky one of me, as he had been doing each day so far haha
Once we’d had our fill, we said bye to Pike Place Market and decided to go do MORE touristy things in the city! We headed over to Seattle Center to do some of the touristy attractions there in the heart of the city. Also, somewhere in here I managed to find a Sephora and I went in to get my birthday gift. I’m like a moth to a flame, ok.
So something cool Seattle has is a little monorail!! It’s so cute and has big windows so you can look out over the city while you ride. So cute.
They even had monorail MERCHANDISE!!!!
So Seattle Center is basically an area of the city for entertainment, arts, museums, fun things like that. It’s also near the Space Needle so we got to walk by and check that out as well!
Right as you get off the monorail the floor is quite artsy, which I appreciated:
A couple Space Needle shots:
There’s also a children’s museum nearby, a science center, and a poetry garden! The whole place is so artsy and charming. Here’s a few of my favorite things we saw:
There was also this really beautiful fountain there – it’s really hard to describe, it was GIGANTIC and so pretty! There were a bunch of kids running around and playing in it when we were there too.
And of course we also took some photos of us:
At this point we were getting pretty tired and had gotten our fill of the city, so we headed back to my sister’s place to regroup. On our way out of the city we saw this man walking NINE DOGS!!!!!!!!!!!
Our plans for the evening were to head to one of the local beaches to relax and get a peaceful end to our time in Seattle. The beach that we went to also happened to have an off leash dog park!!! I tell you, Seattle is so dog-friendly I love it. There were SO MANY beautiful puppies:
Oh yeah, the beach was nice too:
🙂
Once it got dark, we headed back home to get dinner at a local place that I don’t remember the name of and I didn’t take any pictures of….lol. But I remember I had poutine there. So that’s nice.
Our third and final day in Seattle was jam-packed but it was SO much fun! I think this was my favorite day there, I just LOVED Pike Place Market SO MUCH. Seattle is such a fun city full of culture and everyone just seemed so happy. My siblings all said that’s something common about the city – everyone just loves living there.
So aside from us leaving in the morning, that wraps up our time in Seattle! It was a great start to our two-part vacation and I’m so glad we got to go see my siblings. I’m sure we will be back!!
In the next post our vacation continues and we’re headed to Disneyland! It might take a while to get that post written and ready because there’s so much to say, but I’m so excited to write about our first time there 🙂 til next time!
xo, kaela
