Seattle, pt. 2 Chihuly Garden and Glass and the Space Needle

I spent my Sunday in Seattle going to the Chihuly Garden and Glass and the Space Needle. I booked a joint ticket; it was timed for entrance into the Space Needle, but open-ended for Chihuly. I didn't have any idea what to expect at Chihuly, I thought, meh, glass, okay I'll check it out. Well, shut the front door, I was blown away, jaw-dropping. The colors, the shapes and complexity and variety, it was all just crazy. The hushed silences were not required, but I think everyone was overwhelmed with the scope of what we were seeing. You kind of flow from room to room, taking in the colors, and then you move out of the dark rooms into a greenhouse type of structure and then into gardens. 

The Chihuly is very near the Space Needle and a park with treats and vendors, which is a good place to hang out and people watch and wait for your turn to join the queue to go up to the top. There are some reviews that are dismissive of going to the top of the Space Needle, it's cheesy, tacky, boring, a tourist trap. I think you have to make up your own mind. If you like going to the tops of buildings, and I do, I wanted to do it. I like the perspective you get when you are high above the city, looking out, and from up in the Space Needle, which was erected for the 1962 World's Fair, you can see into the port, and if the skies cooperate, you can glimpse Mt. Rainier. You can go outside, which I did, and get annoyed with people taking selfies, which I did. I went in early evening, and if I planned it differently, I might have gone later in the evening to see the city at night. There is a bar on the rotating floor, which might be cool, but I'm too cheap and I don't really drink, so, I gave that a miss. I am glad I went up, and I think I would have regretted not checking out one of America's most iconic sites with its spacecrafty capsule.