Sleeping Well In Seattle - A Thanksgiving Weekend Adventure

Our Haunted Hotel Room 1120

View from the Hotel Bedroom Window

Staying Right Next to Macy's

Anthony in China Town

Kelly in China Town

Baked Goods at Cake House

Interesting Dish at Duk Li Dim Sum's

Bake Shop We Visited

For Thanksgiving Anthony decided he wanted to do something nontraditional for a change of pace. I was thinking maybe he wanted to bake a ham or do surf and turf for Thanksgiving dinner. I was definitely not thinking large enough because instead of unusual Thanksgiving food choices Anthony was thinking a total change in scenery. Next thing I knew he had us booked on a flight to Seattle on Thanksgiving Day for a weekend adventure splashing around playing tourist.

We did celebrate Thanksgiving with the boys (complete with turkey and fixings) on Wednesday night before leaving town. Traveling on Thanksgiving was great because the airport was very calm and quiet, the flight was half full and the Sound Transit from SeaTac to Westlake was almost completely empty.

Anthony booked us into the Mayflower Park Hotel in Downtown Seattle for our stay. We were given room 1120 which I discovered our first night there was the site of reported hauntings. Apparently three different sets of guests complained of a presence in the room we were staying in.

“Nestled in the heart of the city is this historic hotel built in 1927, ideally located near local points of interest such as the Space Needle, Seattle Waterfront and Pike Place Market. A number of guests have reported disturbances in room 1120, with rumors that it's the ghost of an old man who used to live on the sixth floor, although the hotel's owner claims he's friendly and doesn't really bother people.”

It was kind of humorous because I was looking up hauntings on my Kindle Fire when I found the article and then asked Anthony what room we were in and he confirmed we were in fact staying it that very room. The good news is that if the ghost visited we have no memory of his presence as we were on the go every all day - every day and would have slept through just about anything (hauntings included).

Since we arrived on Thanksgiving our food options were looking pretty darn slim as Seattle was like a ghost town and the only restaurant we found to be open was Olive’s in the hotel. I came up with the idea of taking a bus to China Town with the hopes that some of the Chinese restaurants would be open and my hunch was totally on the mark. We asked a young gal on the street where she liked to eat and she recommended Duk Li Dim Sum. We did notice pretty quickly that we were the only Caucasians in the restaurant and also the only two people that did not speak Chinese. They handed us a ticket and a menu and the concept was for us to check off the quantity of each item that we wanted. Since we had never sampled most of what they serves we just had to take a shot in the dark and pick things that sounded tasty or looked interesting. We like to call these types of tastings “Flavor Adventures”. Most of what we selected happened to be pretty tasty although there were also a few items that were not favorites. We also stopped at a Chinese bakery and picked up a few sweets to take back to our room for late night cravings.

After our late afternoon lunch we walked around China Town and found the Kinokuniya Book Store open. Boy was the book store interesting. Most of the publications and books were in Japanese and Chinese including a huge magazine section. They also had sets of miniature Japanese Anime character rubber stamps and matching crafting tape. I could not resist so I purchased a set of Sentimental Circus stamps and 4 matching tapes. All the stamps are very tiny. I am not sure what I am going to do with them yet but they are a great memory of our day in China Town. We also walked around the Chinese market and I purchased some Red Li Hing Mui. I would eat these sweetened dried plums when I was a kid living in Hawaii. Just seeing them made my mouth water. Anthony passes on the dried plums.

Since we had the day wide open we did attempt to see if any Letterboxes were in the immediate area of where we were staying but did not see any listed that we could easily find their starting point or they were not accessible on the holiday.  If we had rented a car this would have been a good option but since we were on foot most of the time we decided that most of the local boxes were just too far away to get to without some planning.

We took a bus back into downtown after stopping at Starbucks in China Town and then walked around the deserted city a little. We finally made our way to Oliver’s lounge in the hotel for spiked holiday libations and a fruit and cheese plate. It was a wonderful and fun first day in Seattle.