Escapades as a Burns: West Coast Trip: Mount St. Helens & Seattle (Day 12-14)

As I finish up writing about our California/West Coast Trip, I am happy that I have completed it before Christmas! I wanted to be done long before now, but life has gotten in the way.

After we left the Crater Lake area, we got back on the Amtrak and headed for Mount St. Helens. It was another tedious ~~8 hour~~ 9 hour Amtrak trip (delayed one hour at the beginning). This was a horrible leg of our trip. We had a really rude waiter for breakfast, unexpected long stops, loud neighbors near us on the train, and we were in tunnels for most of the trip so we couldn't even see part of the Cascades. We were definitely glad to just get there! We didn't arrive until early evening, so we waited to see the volcano/mountain until the next morning. Our accommodations for the evening was a little cabin on a lake about 30 minutes from the volcano.

Beautiful sunset from the cabin's porch

The next morning, we headed up the mountain. On the way, we stopped at this awesome mom n' pop restaurant for breakfast. They even let us look at a scrapbook of pictures and newspaper articles from the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Those of you that know me, know that I love scrapbooks! It was very neat to see pictures of the devastation almost 20 miles away from the volcano. Driving up toward Mount St. Helens was very peaceful and we got to see glimpses of the mountain every few turns.

When we finally got up there, we were able to see an entire "museum" of how the eruption happened exactly, videos of what happened, what life has been like since, and many photos of the mountain before the big eruption. They also had an observation deck where we able to take pictures of the hollowed portion where it erupted. This is a great place for kids! They had so many exhibits to show them how it worked with animations. It was very windy and cold up there, so you'll see lots of windblown hair pictures...not exactly the modelesque wind-blown look that you want.

From the observation deck

Us in front of Mount St. Helens

After we left Mount St. Helens, we had to get back on the Amtrak for another 3 hours to land up in Seattle. This trip was much better! We were sitting in leather chairs with free Wifi; knowing that it would be the shortest leg of our trip.

First view of Seattle from the Amtrak

The cab driver who took us from the Amtrak station was a little interesting. He was not exactly a person I would want our future kids around, but he gave us some major laughs. On the car ride over, we listened to his band's CD and I'll leave it there. You'll have to ask Ryan about this one if you want more details.

Seattle was looking very promising. We could see the Space Needle from our hotel room.

This was one of our favorite hotel rooms. It was really clean, nice, and spacious. I'll just post one picture of it, but this was only half of the room. Nice feng shei.

Photoshoot in the room :)

We only stayed in the hotel for a little bit before we went out to explore the city. I fell in love with Seattle right away. Very clean; I felt very safe...what more can you ask for. With Ryan's handy dandy tripod, which came in handy everywhere that we went, we took a few photos with the Space Needle.

One of our favorite pictures from the trip.

After that, we chowed down on pizza from Tutta Bella Neopolitan Pizzeria, who had a great happy hour deal as well. What a way to end our two week adventure on the West Coast! I'm sure we will visit again; there is still so much more to see.