Seattle Weekend

Rick and I decided we needed a romantic getaway and took off for Seattle on Friday morning. We stayed at the wonderful Vintage Park hotel on 5th Street right across from the cool new library. We’ve stayed there before and it’s really nice.

After checking into the hotel, we walked up to the Frye Museum. If you’ve never been there before, it’s a wonderful, small museum. Mr. and Mrs Frye donated their expansive art collection to the city of Seattle with the stipulation that the museum remain free to the public. One of the exhibits there now is called The Old, Weird America. It explores the “widespread resurgence of folk imagery and mythic history” in the current art scene in America. I love weird, naive art and this was so great. Some of it was very political and hard to relate to. Some was great. Some was just stupid, but all of it shows a creative mind at work. You can watch a video about the show here.

We walked back to our hotel but first took a quick walk around the library. The building is all concrete and glass and is oddly shaped. The spaces inside were interesting but overall I thought the building had a somewhat antiseptic feel to it. Rick took this shot of the escalator.

There is a great Italian restaurant in the hotel called Tulio Ristorante and we had a delicious dinner there Friday night. The food was exquisite. I would highly recommend it.

Saturday started out dry and we walked up to a coffee shop we love. It’s called Victrola coffee and they roast their own beans. Very good. Then the weather turned very blustery, cold and rainy. We tried to go to Gas Works Park but the weather was blowing our umbrellas inside out. So we headed over to the Fremont area and had some cupcakes at Cupcake Royale. Aren’t they beautiful? Salted Caramel, Red Velvet Cake, Pumpkin Maple and Coconut. All natural, no preservatives, baked fresh everyday.

We drove around Ballard as well and just happened to drive by a quilt store. It’s called the Quilting Loft and is definitely worth a visit. They had tons of really cool fabrics and great patterns. All the hip, new collections. I made myself buy a couple of pieces because we have to support our independent shops!

In the afternoon we took in an exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington Campus. The show featured a collection of polaroids by Robert Mapplethorpe and a collection called Sawdust Mountain by Eirik Johnson. Both were delightful.

We had dinner that night in West Seattle. We’ve never been to that part of Seattle before but we had read about a really cool restaurant there called West 5. The space used to be a small, probably 2 lane, bowling alley at one time and was done up in old fifties vinyl. The drinks and the food was great. Here is my Black Currant Cosmopolitan.

Sunday the weather was a tiny bit nicer so we headed over to Kerry Park on Queen Anne’s Hill. This has to be one of the best views in the city without going up the Space Needle. The neighborhood around the park is lovely. Beautiful old homes a lot like some of our neighborhoods here in Portland.  We had a lovely walk along the wall that follows the ridge. Rick took this picture through the sculpture that’s in the park.

After a very late breakfast at The Queen Anne Cafe, we headed on home. It was a wonderful, relaxing weekend.