On Sunday morning Byron and Christine took us to one of their favorite (extremely hipster infested) breakfast places, OddFellows. I can see why Byron likes it though, it’s completely his style; old turn of the century (or earlier) appliances, furniture, everything. Their “key” logo even looks like one of Byron’s drawings (I wouldn’t be surprised if he did their logo and was too humble to mention it to us). The food was good, and I freaked out everyone around us when I dribbled the chocolate beignet sauce on my sandwich. The sandwich had many other “sweet” elements to it, so it actually went together with the chocolate quite well.
After breakfast Christine dropped us off at the pier and Sam and I headed to the aquarium. The aquarium wasn’t bad, but it paled in comparison to the Long Beach Aquarium. It was a very kid-centric experience, and focused more on coral reefs and brightly colored tropical fish than larger more complicated exhibits at other aquariums (like the king crab aquarium, jellyfish tank, or manta-ray tank at Long Beach).
There were two octopi at the aquarium, but both were unfortunately asleep when we went through.
Sam wanted a photo of the baby puffins really badly. Her camera wasn’t fast enough to get a good shot. I quickly discovered that through the rain and reflections mine wasn’t either.
The aquarium has a cool underwater dome. It reminded me of that show SeaQuest 2032… that was on tv a long time ago.
When we walked by the seal tank there was a solitary seal that kept doing a loop quickly through the tank over and over and over. He went so fast it was impossible to get a clear shot.
One of the attractions of the aquarium was a new baby otter. Like the octopi the otter was asleep as well. The otter tank is half outdoors, so getting a good shot through the rain (and plentiful children) was a tad difficult.
I don’t remember what these guys below even are (muskrats?), but they were all asleep too.
Instead of putting together a full size tank to house full-size jellyfish, the Seattle Aquarium went a different route and had a circular flowing tank you could walk through with baby (or maybe just small) jellyfish. In person this is a cool exhibit, but photographing the jellyfish in any kind of aesthetically pleasing manner is a bit of a challenge because of the reflectiveness of the curved surface and the transparency.
Our next stop was the Argosy Harbor Cruise. While waiting we stopped by Starbucks and Sam posed with Elliott outside.
The boat had little heat and I only made it worse by continually opening the windows to take photographs.
The day was so rainy and gray though that even manipulating the photos in photoshop did little to remove the “blah” look.
The boat tour guide said that we had come upon a “national geographic moment” when we passed the sea lions sleeping on the bouy. Most of the folks on the boat ran out to bark at the animals. Sam and I sat in our seats, as sea lions are plentiful (and you can get much closer to them) in Malibu. After the boat tour was over we headed to a restaurant in Belltown called Local360. I had fried chicken and cheese grits and Sam had steak frites. Both seemed somehow slightly incomplete, but I have to say (I love cheese, remember), the cheesy polenta was delicious.
After dinner we went to B&O for some chocolate desserts. Our waiter seemed like he was a drug-addled hipster, which became a constant source of amusement for us. Afterwards Christine dropped Sam off at our hotel and Byron dropped Christine off at home. Byron then took me to Queen Anne park to take some night shots and take care of more “shop talk” (this WAS a business trip, remember?). By this time the rain was coming down slightly harder than a drizzle. Taking long exposure photos was problematic because the only railing was kind of low and the rain kept dotting the lens (as well as producing more fog than preferred).
After a few minutes at Queen Anne we headed to the haunted hospital (parking lot) on the other side of town. The shots taken here, although dealing with the same wet conditions, proved much better as we found a sign pole with a relatively clear view.
The photo below is a zoomed in version of the photo above. Here you can clearly see the difference in night shots between a stabilized (gorillapod) version and the Space Needle shakey-in-the-cold-hands version from two nights before.
