A Bird's Eye View

Now that summer vacation is here (including the word vacation is key because summer STILL isn't really here!), I have been to Seattle several more times recently. I only went in a handful of times from the time when we arrived last summer through last winter. One of the things that we were saving was going up the Space Needle. When Chris got here in February, we decided it would be nice to wait and go up all together when Holly arrived. Unfortunately, Holly arrived right as my world spun out of control at school with millions of performances and various meetings about how it wasn't looking so good for my job next year. Anyway, we finally made it to the Space Needle on July 7th and up we went. I was happily surprised to find that it didn't feel very high up and there was no need to be nervous or bothered by the height. It was a relatively clear day and I had just gotten my new camera. Oh, side note: I have a new camera. It's so fancy that I'm pretty afraid to touch it. It's a Canon DSL camera and I have two zoom lenses I switch between, which is when holding the camera becomes nerve-wracking. In any case, I'm very excited to have it and now I'm working on learning how to use it. So far, it just stays on the auto settings (which I'm so glad it has) and I will hopefully graduate to some more manuel settings as the summer progresses. Anyway, the ultimate excitement of the day was that I was finally able to take some satisfying pictures of Mount Rainier. And that I can now say I've been up the Space Needle. There is another large mountain but I don't know if it was Mount Olympus or Mount Baker. I keep meaning to try and figure it out and keep forgetting. In any case, it's one of those two so if you see it in a picture...you'll know.

These are the Olympic mountains. They are on our side of the sound but still across more water from us. We see these up close and personal any time there is a clear day. It doesn't matter how often you see them, they are always spectacular and always look different depending on sky color, cloud formations, season, etc. I love them.

That is the skyline of Seattle with Mount Rainier in the distance. when I wrote the post I forgot just how clear a day it was. Mount Rainier is magical because it often appears to be floating in the sky. I get excited every single time I see it and usually cannot stop myself from pointing and shouting "There it is!"

There it is again! This is with the 250X zoom lens. The blurriness at the bottom is from the cage of bars that surrounds the viewing deck of the space needle but I think it looks kind of magical! :o)

I don't usually find myself at eye level with a helicopter, especially not this close up (much closer in real life than in the camera lens), so I took a picture.

The ship in the lead is the Bainbridge Island ferry, the one we usually take. The middle ship is the Bremerton ferry and the ship in third has been identified by Petty Officer third class Hanks as a frigate. Hope he's right or at least that none of his RDCs (boot camp punishers) is reading this blog!

This is the Seattle skyline as we pull away in our ferry. As you get farther away the Cascade mountains appear behind it but I don't seem to have a picture of that somehow.

Here is the other mountain...whoever it is...also from the ferry but on the opposite side than the next one.

And this is my magical mountain one more time, taken from the ferry about halfway across the 35 minute section of the sound that we cross. There it is!