A Week Around Seattle and Mount Rainier

A friend was getting married south of Tacoma, which is what put us in Washington for a week in June. My dad and I flew in Friday night and checked into the Edgewater, the one Seattle hotel built out over the water on Pier 67 — that was home base for the whole trip. The wedding was one evening near the end; the rest of the days we filled in as we went — a museum, a full day on Mount Rainier, a harbor cruise, and a lot of walking around Seattle. Overcast in the mountains, sunny in the city, which is about the deal you make with the Pacific Northwest in June.

Day 1: The Museum of Flight

Saturday we made our way to the Museum of Flight, on the south edge of Boeing Field. The Great Gallery hangs a few dozen aircraft from the ceiling all at once — including an SR-71 Blackbird — and there’s a dark side-room with the Apollo-era lunar rover that’s easy to miss. Across the bridge, the outdoor Aviation Pavilion is the real draw: you can walk under the wing of the first jet built as Air Force One and stand next to a WWII B-17.

Day 2: Golf at Newcastle

The Golf Club at Newcastle sits up on the hills east of Lake Washington, and on a clear day the course gives you the whole Seattle skyline across the water from most of the back nine. It’s the kind of place where the view competes with the golf. Sunny the whole round, and a good one to play with my dad.

Day 3: Mount Rainier

The whole day went to Mount Rainier on a Northwest Tours shuttle — a guided day trip that makes several stops for exploring, short hikes, and lunch, which is exactly the right way to see the mountain for the first time. We came in from the northeast off SR-410 near Chinook Pass, worked our way around the park past Paradise, and came out the Nisqually entrance in the southwest — the route is mapped at the end of the post. It was gray and low-clouded, so the summit never fully showed, but that turns your attention to the smaller things: the impossibly blue-green meltwater creeks, the historic Paradise Inn tucked under the Tatoosh Range, the braided glacial rivers running gray with rock flour, the wet meadows just starting to green up for the short alpine summer.

Day 4: Seattle on foot

Back in the city and back in the sun. I spent the day on a self-guided audio tour of downtown — a Project Expedition walking tour that winds from the Seattle Aquarium along the waterfront past the Great Wheel, through Pioneer Square and the Smith Tower, up through the financial district to Pike Place Market, and ends with a bonus loop around the Space Needle and through Chihuly Garden next door. The map below shows the full route. Good way to cover a lot of ground and actually understand what you’re looking at — the stops cover everything from the Klondike Gold Rush to Nirvana to the Gum Wall in Post Alley. Made a detour mid-tour to Reuben’s Brews for a pint at their downtown taproom window, which is not a bad way to rest your feet.

Day 5 & 6: Pre-Wedding Festivities

Wednesday started on the water — an hour-long harbor cruise out of the downtown piers. You leave under the Great Wheel, run out into Elliott Bay past sailboats and the container cranes of the Port of Seattle, and loop back with the full skyline behind you. Not a long trip, but the best way to see the city is from the water looking back at it. Friends arrived that evening, and Wednesday night we crowded in with the groom for Blood on the Clocktower — the social-deduction game where a town tries to figure out which of them is secretly the demon while everyone lies to your face. The groom narrated. The nerd’s version of a bachelor party, and exactly right for this group. It ran much later than anyone planned.

Thursday morning the bride and groom hosted a welcome event for the wedding group at U-Town Wine Bar in the University District — wine, board games, and the kind of relaxed gathering that sets the right tone for a wedding weekend. From there the afternoon shifted back downtown. Storyville Coffee in Pike Place Market became the go-to stop through these downtown days — good coffee, a window seat, and the market moving around you, the kind of spot you return to without thinking about it. The afternoon included a tasting at White Heron Cellars, a small Washington winery with a room tucked into the back of the market, then more wandering with friends. Dinner was at Von’s 1000 Spirits, which does exactly what the name implies — a long menu of spirits and well-made cocktails alongside solid food. After dinner we moved on to Bathtub Gin on Blanchard Street — dark, leather-seated, very good crushed-ice drinks — and finished the night at Roquette around the corner on 1st Avenue.

Day 7: The wedding

The reason for the whole trip. The venue was Thornewood Castle — a brick Tudor estate on American Lake, well south of Tacoma, that was shipped over from England a century ago and reassembled stone by stone. Formal hedged gardens, white chairs set out on the lawn, and the ceremony timed so the sun dropped over the lake behind it. Golden hour did most of the work.

Looking back

Nine days, and the shape of it was a wedding at one end and a mountain in the middle, with the city filling the gaps. The two halves of the trip barely looked like the same place — moody and gray up at Paradise, bright and blue down on the Sound two days later. If you do this: give Rainier a full day and go in expecting weather — the Northwest Tours shuttle is the right call for a first visit; book ahead for The Pink Door in Post Alley and Purple Café and Wine Bar — both come highly recommended and neither will have a table on short notice; and take the harbor cruise even though an hour feels short. The map below is the week end to end — the drive out to Rainier and back, the loop around the park, and the run south to the wedding.