Day 72 - August 19, 2002

Seattle, Washington

August 19

I took care of shipping my bike home and visited some more tourist traps today. The first order of business was to pick up the bicycle boxes that Kelly sent to me at the post office which is only two blocks away from the hostel. It took me a while to diassemble the bike and trailer and figure out exactly how I would get it all to fit in a box that meets the UPS size limit. I knew that that if you measure the length of the box and then add it to the girth of the box it cannot exceed 130 inches. When I got done the total measurement was 127 inches. It cost me $54.00 to ship including insurance; USAir would have charged me $80 to take the bike on the plane. By shipping it UPS I also don't have to worry about dragging it to the airport, making sure it passes the open–box security check they do on it, and dragging it from Pittsburgh back to Lock Haven in Kelly's Neon.

The harbor cruise I went on last night had some problems so they gave us all another free cruise. I picked the most expensive cruise available - a two hour tour of Elliot Bay, the Lake Washington Ship Canal, and Lake Union. I enjoyed it immensely! Here is a sequence of photos showing our boat entering the locks, rising to the Lake Union water level, and exiting the locks.

Lake Union hosts a very busy landing strip for seaplanes that ferry tourists and residents between Seattle and other areas of the Pacific Northwest, particularly to Vancover and Victoria, British Columbia. At least a dozen float planes took off and landed in the fifteen minutes that we were on the lake.

Here are some other pictures I took along the cruise. In order you can see Paul Allen's yacht, some houseboats, a railroad drawbridge, and Lake Union.

I went in this one store where they have some pretty crazy stuff on display. There are two human mummys (Sam and Sylvia), a collection of miniature carvings and paintings (rice grain carvings shown here) and other weird stuff.

There is a Russian submarine tour on pier 48 in town. The sub is a Foxtrot class diesel–electric sub that operated from 1972 to 1992. It's more of a self-guided tour and isn't nearly as good as the tour of the WWII era sub that is on display at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.