Seattle, WA: Downtime

Sunday, January 13th

We were able to sleep in again before traveling to Chicago. We arrived in the city and a group of us headed to Portillo’s for some delicious burgers, Italian sandwiches and beer. Portillo’s will definitely be on my list when I return to Chicago in the future. We then toured around Chicago looking for a good bar and wound up at Rock Bottom so we could play pool for the rest of the evening.

Saturday, January 12th

Our first totally free day! Sleeping in felt great and was VERY relaxing. Too bad we didn’t have more sleep-ins over the course of the first week, but every tour was definitely worth it and I wouldn’t want to trade the experiences that we have had. My younger brother, Matt, and his girlfriend, T’ien, drove up from Portland, OR to come visit me in Seattle. When they arrived in town, we headed to the Experience Music Project Museum (and with that we gained free admission to the Science Fiction Museum which was an interesting experience). The EMP Museum was pretty cool with a neat music lab exhibit that would teach you how to play different instruments (guitars, basses, drums, piano, as well as how to mix tracks). I would definitely suggest going to see it, but it wasn’t as cool as I had heard that it was. A trip to Seattle isn’t complete without a stop at the Pike Place Market. What an interesting place – beautiful fruit, tons of crabs and fish, flowers, and art spread through 3 floors on the hillside down to the waterfront all bustling with hundreds if not thousands of tourists and locals alike.

After our sight-seeing, we headed back to the hotel, picked up some pizza and beer and watched the Patriots defeat the Jaguars on their way to the SuperBowl and a 19-0 season. What a season they have had. If you haven’t seen it, you should go check out their game versus the Ravens to see just how close they were to losing that perfect season (you can find a highlight clip at www.patriots.com) – definitely a tense season at times. We had a low-key evening with a bunch of LFM’s joining us to celebrate the win and just hang out.