Seattle, down under

Remi was our host for 3 days. On Saturday we had originally wanted to go to the Harry Potter exhibit in Seattle, but after realizing it would cost us $150 just to go see a bunch of movie props it wasn't quite as appealing.
Instead we opted to go on the army base with Remi and see her office (and hopefully glimpse a tank or two). The boys loved this!

Here we are in her snazzy Rx office:


Boys are totally enamored with having an aunt in the army. She is the coolest aunt ever.



KK really loved the doctor examination table in her office.

After the base visit we decided to go to the Kitsap peninsula and take a ferry from there into Seattle. I don't know why I didn't take photos of that, but we did get a good shot of the amazing bridge that gets you onto the peninsula.



When we got to seattle we messed around in Pioneer Square and went on the underground tour. Which, by the way, was amazing. Definitely recommend that one.

Here we are playing in a toystore in one of the original underground buildings:


Calder wanted to buy everything in there, I can imagine he was pretty disappointed when we left empty handed!



The tour really helped him forget though!

Seattle really has an interesting history. Look it up sometime. I read a book once called "Armageddon's children" and in the story these kids lived in the forgotten underground passages of Seattle after that I have always wanted to do the tour to find out more. Basically they did a really crappy job building Seattle the first time around. When the tides would come in the streets would flood, children would drown in the streets, they used sawdust to layer the streets which created pot holes big enough to be mapped. Whole cart and horse units would disappear in them. The their "Crappers" would explode raw sewage when the tide came in, etc. Pretty nasty place to live. Then, as fortune would have it, the entire city burnt to the ground in one night and they decided to do things right this time.... Sort of. What they ended up doing was building 15-30 ft walls that completely enclosed each of the 33 square blocks of the city. Then they filled the streets in with dirt and debris until the streets were as high as the tops of the walls. They had ladders at each corner for people to go down to the ground level inside each walled in block, and shop. Can you imagine??? Finally after many years they enclosed the first floor of every building entirely and put a side walk over the top of the walkways, kind of like ceiling-ed sidewalks underground. This made the second stories now the first story and then they built 7 sea walls to protect the city from flooding.

Here we are at actual ground level:



The infamous Crappers that graced the homes of most city dwellers:


Calder got a huge kick out of the exploding Crappers story, even shared the story with his class at school. Funny kid.

What happens when you use sawdust as filler for your foundation:

sunken floors

The floors caved and sunk 4 feet.

Here is the inside of a shop looking out the windows to where the street would have been:

you can see that these floors are also sunken

Looking up at the skylights that are built into all the sidewalks overhead:




Someones discarded bathtub:



Kind of eerie: Kaelan is standing on a street corner, underneath a street light, underneath the sidewalk!!

Below, You are looking at the first building rebuilt:

- remember that it's front door is not on it's first floor.

When all the buildings were built, they knew the plan was going to be that eventually people would all enter through the second floor, so for many years all of the buildings had floating doors on their second stories that led out to open air.

It was raining so hard that we got really wet above ground and underground.

Ansel was soaked.

Afterwards, we ate at an authentic Vietnamese restaurant...Yum!! Now I am itching to go on the underground tours of Portland.... only our underground history is much more nefarious...I guess I won't bring the kids on that one, it might give them nightmares!


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