I spent last week in the Seattle area visiting my mom and sister. Had a lot of fun visiting, learning how to make lefse and doing some touristy things. One of those touristy things was a visit to the Space Needle, a place I hadn’t been in many years. Another was a visit to Chihuly Garden and Glass. The third was checking out MoPop, the Museum of Pop Culture, formerly known as the Experience Music Project. All three are in the Seattle Center within steps of each other.
Let’s start with the Space Needle built in the early 60s for the Century 21 Exposition aka the Seattle World’s Fair held in 1962. Things have changed over the years. A glass floor was recently added where a revolving restaurant used to be. This is a floor below the observation deck. On the observation deck you can stay inside and get a 360 degree view of the city or walk around outside. We went to the restaurant once for my sister’s high school graduation. I remember it being quite fun. Alas, there is no restaurant right now in the Needle.
If you want to see what the Space Needle looked like when it was first built, check out the movie It Happened at the World’s Fair with Elvis Presley. There’s a scene in the restaurant and a number of them on the grounds of the exposition. We rented it from Amazon Prime. It’s interesting how the Needle dominated the skyline of the city then. Now it’s pretty much dwarfed by a lot of very tall buildings.
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| Part of the glass floor |
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| View from the Observation Deck |
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| It was a tad windy on the Observation Deck |
Chihuly Garden and Glass is a museum featuring works by Dale Chihuly, a well-known glass artist. You may have seen his work at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. There are exhibits inside as well as glass sculptures mixed with plants outside. Truly amazing.
The last place we visited was MoPop where we saw a special exhibit on costumes from Disney films and TV shows. It was interesting to hear how some of those came about and the inspiration the designers used for them. The rest of the museum was interesting as well, but my favorite part was the costume exhibit.
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| MoPop and the Space Needle |
If you get up to Seattle, I recommend seeing all 3 of these places. We did it in 2 days, but you could probably do all 3 in one day if you started early enough.
