Seattle

We arrived in Seattle around noon. Because we dropped mom off at the airport at 5 am, a 7 hour drive got us there pretty early. We had some errands to run: getting the car oil changed, finding a FedEx to return Pramod's broken phone, and checking into our campsite. None of this was actually done in Seattle. We camped about 30 minutes south of the city in Federal Way.

After those errands, we went for our first tour of Seattle. I don't even like to drive in Boston, so I knew it was a mistake to be driving into Seattle. Those streets heading down to the water are scary! I'm glad they checked out our breaks when we had the oil changed -- not that anything was wrong with them, just for peace of mind.

The parking situation is expensive. The very illusive street parking is $2.50 per hour. Other advertised parking was $8 for 2 hours. After driving around for a while, we settled for $9 for 3 hours. Now I guess that's not too bad, but I don't know what we'll do when we come in for a full day tomorrow... ugh money stresses me out!

While downtown, we checked out Pike's Place Market. It reminded us a lot of the market in Mysore: lots of people, noise, things to see, and strong smells (fish, food, and flowers especially).