Bellevue, Seattle and Home

Today we had a whirlwind tour of three gardens and the Space Needle. It had to be a whirlwind because the restaurant in the hotel only had two servers at breakfast. There are 56 people in our group and there were other hotel guests in the restaurant as well. Someone really dropped the ball in communicating the fact that all of us would want to use our complementary breakfast coupons and that we all had a deadline. Breakfast was so, so slow. One guy, who wasn’t in our group finally got up from his table saying he wasn’t a waiter, just a mortgage broker, but there must be something he could do. He rustled up a coffee pot and a pitcher of water and went around the dining room taking care of all the people who were waiting. Eventually, we all did get breakfast but we didn’t get out of the restaurant on time and that meant we had to shave time off of our tours today.

The gardens today were all beautiful. We scurried through the Bellevue Botanical Garden and then over to a beautiful Japanese Garden in Washington Park Arboretum. It is a beautiful garden- so well done. We went to another large Japanese garden in Portland last year. This one didn’t seem to be as large, but it was so nice. If we are ever in Seattle again, we will go back because we could have used more time there.

We had lunch in the Space Needle after that. A nice salad and Prime rib dinner. We had just enough time to go up to the top of the Space Needle and look around before we got back on the bus. Before we went to the airport we drove out to a Bonsai collection at the Weyerhaeuser headquarters and it was absolutely worth the drive. First, their headquarters building is pretty cool and set in a pretty, woodsy area. Second, the collection was the most beautiful collection of bonsai I have ever seen. Beautifully displayed and all of the bonsai were like works of art. There was no doubt they were all works of love.

We really lucked out with the weather on this trip. It was supposed to be cold and rainy every day. It was cold, but we had brought our big down jackets and the only times it rained, we were either in our hotels or on our bus. It never rained while we were out trying to see things.

I would like to go back again someday to see some of the gardens in mid-summer.






Here are some pictures. One is a view through the Japanese Garden. The others are of a few of the bonsai. One of them, the one with the big chunk of old bark as the base, is from a tree that was growing in the 1500s but the artist has only been working with it since 1986.