Thing 30: Spend a weekend shopping in Seattle area

This time of year I usually go to Phoenix to visit my snowbird parents. Since they didn't go south this year, mom and I decided to take a trip to Seattle (and Vegas, but more on that later!). Mom found a really good deal with the Clipper for two nights and a return trip on the ferry. We've never taken the Clipper and I was interested to see what it was like since living on the Island, I'm a veteran of the BC Ferries and pretty familiar with the Coho as well. I don't have any pictures from the trip down because we left at 5 pm Saturday night and it was soon dark. I was going to take pictures on the way home but that didn't go as planned.

We only had one day in Seattle itself as the Clipper was supposed to leave at 8 am Monday morning. We've been to Seattle many times so we weren't interested in going up the Space Needle but it was close to our hotel and had a monorail that took you downtown. Downtown was more compact than I was expecting. We shopped our way around including a stroll through the top of Pikes Place Market. We booked tickets to the 5th Avenue Theater to see the Music Man at 7 pm so we went back to the hotel for a few hours before heading back downtown to the show. 

The theater was amazing! It is beautifully decorated in a Chinese theme. There was a dragon hanging from the ceiling holding the chandelier. The Music Man was entertaining and I suppose that it qualifies for another thing on my list, Thing 9 - See a play. It was more musical than play though. 

When we got back to the hotel, there was a message from the Clipper. They needed us to be at the terminal at 6:30 am. When we got there the next morning, we found out the sailing was cancelled and they were putting us on a bus for Vancouver. (I forgot to ask what would happen if the BC Ferries weren't running, but they were.) The bus ride was 2 hours and we cleared customs at the border, then off to the BC Ferry. We ended up home a couple of hours later than if we had taken the Clipper so it wasn't too bad. It was disappointing that we didn't get to see the view from the Clipper on the way home or shop the duty free. They did give us breakfast and lunch and a letter for 50% off an adult fare to be used in the next year. The Clipper did everything in their power to get us home in a timely fashion. They can't help the weather. All in all it was a good weekend in Seattle. We'll end up doing more shopping later on this month when we drive down to fly out of SeaTac to Vegas.