Seattle; Sunday, 01 May, 2022

After another expensive breakfast I headed out of the hotel and walked down to pick up the Monorail out to the Space Needle. I wasn’t making a repeat visit, but instead I headed down to the road below the needle to pick up the open-top sightseeing tour bus.

The buses had only resumed service the previous day for their summer season, and when I’d been planning my days the weather forecast for Saturday hadn’t been great, which turned out not to be the case, but it also meant I wasn’t trying to catch them on the very first day of service when things might have been less polished.

I did my usual two circuits of the tour so that I could take in views from both sides of the bus and then stayed on a couple of extra stops so that I was dropped off down on the waterfront where I went for a little wander before stopping for lunch.

After lunch I continued on wandering down until I reached the ferry terminal for the local passenger and car ferry services. A number of different operators offer services from Seattle out to neighbouring communities and Islands and these are all included in the standard fare tariffs. For a lot of the services you only pay when leaving Seattle, the return leg is free – so less than $10 for a two hour round trip felt like a pretty good deal.

The ferry service I took was to the town of Bremerton located further over into the sound, and accessed via the Rich Passage, a narrow and twisting passageway between different parts of the sound that would not look out of place in norther Norway.

Arriving in Bremerton I had two options, due to the ferry only operating a one ship service because of staffing problems post Covid. I could either have a very quick look around in the 20 minutes between arrival and departure, or let that sailing go and wait around for nearly 3 hours for the ferry to make the journey back to Seattle, turn around, come back and turn around again. After getting off the ferry and having a quick look around I decided it was probably best to go for the quick visit which I did before hopping back on the return sailing from my outbound one.

It turned out to be a good call, as the low cloud lifted for a short period of time and I got some pretty good views of the mountains around and behind Seattle from the boat, as well as pretty good views of the snow-capped top of Mount Rainier, which a short while later were obscured again as the cloud came back in – I certainly wouldn’t have seen those if I’d stayed in Bremerton.

Back in Seattle I had a little wander round the Pioneer Square area of town before catching a bus back up the hill to the hotel to freshen up, before heading out a little later to grab a light dinner.

Weather

Sunny Intervals Sunny Intervals
AM PM
Warm (10-20C, 50-68F)
17ºC/63ºF