We played tourist in Seattle last weekend. Ryan had gone fishing all day on Saturday, and we don’t like crowds and traffic much anyway, thus trying to get out of town didn’t seem appealing. So it seemed smart to not try to get away on our long weekend. Instead we wandered downtown Seattle for the afternoon, which was calm and laid back since it was a Sunday and most businesses were closed through Labor Day.
If I were into hash-tagging, this post would be tagged with comfortable, end of summer words. Tags that reminisce of wandering hand in hand warm breezy streets with your husband, sipping iced coffee. Something about agonizing over a soda flavor purchase, window shopping for everything from wood table to fancy shoes, people watching from a park bench, and the non-existent word that could encompass the sensory explosion that is Pike Place Market.
We even did the incredibly cutey touristy thing and took a photo outside the restaurant where Ryan took me on our first fancy dinner date, almost four years ago.
After a rather unremarkable dinner, we went for drinks at Vessel. While it was a little too pretentious (yet not snobby) to be my absolute favorite Seattle cocktail bar (I like quiet corners and unassuming people) it was an incredible experience. Thankfully it was a slow Sunday evening, so we could sit at the uncrowded bar and watch Kevin the bartender at work. My champagne cocktail had some sort of apricot liquor in it, and was perfectly smooth and sippable. Being slow drinkers, we kept wishing the people around us would order drinks so we could watch Kevin make them.
He hand-chipped and shaped a round ice cube (from a big block of ice) that just fit into a scotch glass for one drink. When he poured the drink from the shaker over the sphere in the glass, the amount fit exactly, with the last drop it stretched the liquid tension across the top of the glass, but did not break. One drink required shaking in a vacuum sealed shaker. Another drink was poured into a glass that he prepped with spritzed alcohol, put a match to, and poured a perfect steady stream of liquid into a blue-yellow cloud of flame in the stemmed glass.
Here’s a little bragging side note about Ryan’s amazing resourcefulness. On the way downtown the motorcycle cut out and died. After 20 minutes and pulling apart everything he could on the side of the road with a screw driver, he decided the starter fuse had blown. He replaced the fuse and it started up like a dream. It’s makes me so thankful my husband is handy. When the bike dies he just starts pulling wires and screws and testing things until it starts again. I am generally useless in these situations except for taking pictures and holding the seat open so it doesn’t slam on his hands as he pulls apart the wiring.)
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