Ok a few weeks ago I made a thread asking for some ideas on things to do in Seattle. We leave in a week (early on Thurs the 10th) and will be there until Sunday evening, and I'm looking for advice and info on how long certain things take, etc. so we can try to hammer out some sort of itinerary.
Things on the agenda:
Space Needle (probably)
Kayaking (rental) (where's the best place to go for this?)
Seattle Art Museum/Sculpture Park
Bank of America tower
Pike St. Brewery
Spend a day/night in Vancouver
We would like to go to Olympic Nat'l Park and Vancouver as well. A Ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria would be good too. Is it reasonable to do these things without a car, or will we need to rent one?
space needle - im biased on these things and dont care for the space needle, but i think its like $15 bucks to go to the top. you could look into visiting the columbia tower (bank of america tower) instead - its like 300 or 400 ft higher. i dont have any details on cost/visit hours for the observation deck though
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Center
Kayaking - Agua Verde is a good place to rent (you can tool around lake union/lake washington)
http://www.aguaverde.com/
seattle art museum - has a cool impressionism exhibit going on - expect to spend half a day at the museum and sculpture park.
pike st brewery - good place to grab dinner at the end of your downtown touring.
You should be able to do all of the above + visit the pike market in a full day tooling around downtown, depending on how early you start. Fitting in kayaking and the museum/sculpture park might be tough. I would also recommend checking out the seattle library, it is a pretty cool building.
Vancouver is a 1.5 hour drive from seattle, depending on border wait times (or 2 to 2.5 hours if you take a $70 round trip bus).
olympic national park is a 2.5 hour drive to the nearest areas, farther if you want to go to the beach or the hoh rainforest. Going to olympic national park to do a hike or whatever is a full day.
Taking a boat to vancouver island or the san juan islands would also be a full day assuming you want to explore the islands a bit. I havent been to vancouver island but i think that you'd want to stay over night on the island to make it worthwhile. If you head up that way you could look into renting a sea kayak and doing a sunset sea kayaking tour or something which would be better than renting from agua verde IMO.
You will want to rent a car to do olympic national park, but i think you can take a ferry from downtown seattle to vancouver island so you may not need a car for that. There is also probably a bus or shuttle you can take to anacortes where the san juans ferry leaves from. Do a little googling to research those options.
