Trip Report: November 8 - December 10, 2006
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
31 Day Grand Tour on Amtrak and the Mississippi Queen
Thursday, December 7 to Sunday December 10, 2006
The Seattle Westin occupies two 40-story circular towers at the foot of Fifth Avenue, just a few steps from the Monorail Terminal. (The last time we were in Seattle, the voters had decided to discontinue the Monorail and it had stopped running; but it has started up again.)
The Westin Towers
This is by far our favorite place to stay in Seattle, not only for the solid comfort of their Heavenly Beds which they introduced in 1999, revolutionizing the hotel industry, but also because of their excellent restaurant, The Coldwater Bar & Grill.
Coldwater Bar & Grill
There was a time when hotel food had a reputation for mediocrity, but that time is long past. We look forward to the excellent menu at the Coldwater, and have enjoyed high-quality food and service at each Westin we have visited on this trip, in Portland, Columbus, and Greenville.
We have also had some of our best meals on this trip at the Marriott Memphis, the Blake Hotel in Chicago, and the Camberly Brown in Louisville.
During our previous visits to The Coldwater, we became acquainted with Guilia, an experienced and friendly waitress who has been here for decades. It is like meeting an old friend again when we enter the restaurant for breakfast. The hostess has also worked here for years, and she remembers our favorite table.
At home, we occasionally enjoy our own invention, the North Pole Ice Cold Martini. We store potato vodka (most vodka is now made from grain) in the freezer, pour it into frozen glasses, and garnish it with frozen olives. No decision about whether to shake or stir is needed, because ice, which would dilute this fine mixture, is unnecessary. The frozen olives keep the drink cold until it is finished. We have asked various bartenders around North American if they could duplicate this process, but we’ve been turned down except here at the Coldwater Bar. The bartender, at our request after lunch, stored a bottle of Chopin Vodka and some king-sized olives in his freezer, along with frozen glasses, so our Martinis would be ready by cocktail hour. He was going home at 4 PM, but left a note for the night-shift chap explaining our special request. The Coldwater gets our kudos for serving our North Pole Martinis.
Friday we spent resting up from our four-night journey on Amtrak, completing ongoing business and client bookings, and organizing our luggage – quite a trick after 29 days of travel and the addition of three new shirts for Ted and a Christmas lap-blanket from Aunt Marge. We have checked two bags back to Klamath Falls, and are now down to nine suitcases and carry-ons. We never ran out of clothes.
Saturday we took a walking tour up Fifth Avenue, enjoying the Christmas décor in various store windows and hotels, an activity which we can’t enjoy in our small home town. We toured The Red Lion, Vintage Park, Monaco, Mayflower, and the ultra high-end Fairmont Olympic Hotel, where they were serving High Tea in the Georgian Room. There were many well-behaved children there, and the little girls were dressed up in fancy holiday clothes. One was wearing glittering shoes just like Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz.
The Georgian Room
In spite of a gloomy article in the newspaper claiming that Christmas shopping is an exercise in greed that makes people unhappy, we observe many families who have come in from out of town, at these hotels, who are smiling and happy.
We find refreshment at the nearest Starbucks, which can be found on every other street corner in Seattle.
We tour the new, multi-story Seattle Library, but find the industrial steel architecture to be about as inviting as some of the steel fabrication mills that Ted worked in during his college summers in Ambridge.
Seattle Library
Saturday evening arrives as I sit at the desk in our King Room on the 30th floor, with Christmas lights coming on along Fifth Avenue and skyscrapers surrounding us lighting up to define a dramatic skyline. Seattle’s trademark department store, the Bon Marche, always displays a giant golden star during the Christmas season, and it blinks on. Then the sun sets over Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains.
PS 1: The famous Bon Marche store down the street from The Westin, is now Macys. Many shoppers are carrying shopping bags with the new Macys’ red-star logo – the same insignia that defined the ruthless Communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Apparently nobody else finds this the least bit offensive today.
Macys Division of Federated Stores, a monstrous conglomerate with 800 Macys stores nationwide, has made a concentrated effort to select stores that are the talisman of various cities – Kauffman’s in Pittsburgh, Marshall Fields in Chicago, Mier and Frank in Portland, and Bon Marche here in Seattle. They have bought these unique department stores and made them over into Macys.
Was Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, predicting that the every US company would eventually become a division of the Ramjac Corporation, coming true?
PS 2: One of the fabulous stores on Fifth Avenue is Banana Republic, housed in the form Coliseum Theater building, built in 1916. This is one of many older theaters in Seattle which have been preserved, in this case with a new use. Two others are the Paramount and the Fifth Avenue, preserved and still in use as theaters.
Paramount
Fifth Avenue
Colis
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