Conscious Choice: Travel Through Life

November 2007 | Escape the Pace

Travel Through Life

There’s no place like home for your next getaway.

By Crai S. Bower

Urban hotels hawk weekend getaway deals like the guy selling peanuts at Safeco Field. Scores of packages, touting romance, facials and complimentary breakfasts, suggest we leave the comforts of home for even more comfortable zones. This month, instead of packing up my car or braving the airport and its take-your-shoes off demands, I decided to follow a new and increasingly more popular travel trend and “escape” to my own “backyard”—downtown Seattle.

Like traveling around the world, discovery proves the key at home too. If you’re one of those disciplined souls who procures your vegetables from Pike Place Market, even in the summer, then avoid it while pretending
Seattle’s somewhere new. The truth is, our city is bursting with nooks demanding a deep delve. Shrink or widen your comfort circumference and you may be surprised how “foreign” your hometown can feel.

For starters, Seattle offers plenty more than just the nation’s most educated citizens. Surely you have yet to visit all 61 parks, 9 beaches and 72 miles of trails. And how many of the city’s 17 museums can you even name?

Downtown is no longer simply an urban extension of a high-end mall, more boutiques are appearing in unfamiliar places, as are restaurants. Consider Boat Street Café, a wonderful space that is impossible to find the first time. The wall of windowpanes are expansive, yet the strangely intimate environment nestles perfectly beneath the Denny Western Work Lofts, just north of the Sculpture Park and the terminus of Seattle’s first condo canyon. No worries, though, if you choose from one of the area’s other 9,000 (yes 9,000!) restaurants.

On our most recent downtown excursion we pass on Boat Street and decide to boat instead. We book into downtown as early as possible—why not eke out a few more hours of fantasy?— and stay at the Alexis Hotel, convenient to the newest stretch of change in the city.

The corridor along First Ave from Pioneer Square to Pike Place Market has always been a hardscrabble stroll, a few blocks between tourist destinations that no tourist wished to take. Thankfully, a few gallery owner-pioneers are adding modern art to the more familiar images— nudes you probably wouldn’t hang over the fireplace—from Seattle’s notorious strip. We step inside R E Welch Gallery, one of several new art houses just south of SAM. R E Welch offers an eclectic mix, large evocative bronze sculptures, as well as, brightly colored figures in oils, evocative of Seattle’s diverse aesthetic.

We return south and walk the plank, the two-block-long passenger bridge, to the ferry terminal for our evening voyage to Bainbridge Island and dinner. All the island commuters may cry “why?” at this point but, for the rest of us, riding the ferries remains a Puget Sound dweller’s favorite treat. And, unlike the other ferry routes, the Bainbridge ferry lands in one of Washington’s quaintest towns. We’re heading to Winslow to dine at Four Swallows, an excellent Italian rustica restaurant, located about ten minutes (at a leisurely stroll) from the ferry dock.

Next morning, rather than head downstairs for the easy breakfast, we decide to trek to the International District for dim sum. Seattle isn’t an ideal walking city, the climbs to Capitol Hill are hellish and streets like Madison feel ‘wicked’ crowded and uncomfortable like you’re in Boston or something. But stepping to the I.D. just takes a little planning, and a bit of time.
We pause for tea at the Panama Hotel, one of Seattle’s most important, and overlooked, cultural landmarks. It was on these very steps that Japanese-Americans queued for transport to the internment camps during World War II, clearly among the most diabolical moments in U.S. history, even by today’s embarrassing standards. The Panama Hotel pays homage to this infamy with large photographs of internees on the walls and a view into the basement where luggage (that was over the travel quota) still stands in spectral vigil.

Don’t wait for a special occasion to spend a night or two just a few minutes from home. Pick your property carefully; the less it resembles the past five hotels you’ve stayed at, especially on business trips, the better. Plan a bit of your itinerary, but make most of it up as you go along. And whatever you do, stay away from your urban routines. There’s a reason it’s called a getaway.

Crai S. Bower finds adventure wherever he goes—then writes about it. He will discuss “Winter Wonderscapes” on KUOW’s Sound Focus in November.

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