Jaunted's On a Boat! (The Water Taxi to West Seattle)

May 8, 2009 at 4:37 PM | by juliana | 0 Comments

This week Jaunted editor Juliana will be sharing her experiences from a recent field trip to Seattle where she wasn't afraid to do all the touristy things in town. Any questions or tips? Let us know.

On our last day in Seattle, we needed one more touristy thing to round out our weekend of tourist excursions. So we headed on down to the Pier 55 to take a water taxi to West Seattle.

The Pier here is not as huge as the Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco and fortunately, not as gross. But the numerous t-shirt and souvenirs shops, dodgy food stands, street musicians and "family" restaurants along the pier reassure you that yes, you have walked into a tourist trap.

One stand-out is the 100-year-old Ye Olde Curiosity Shop which is a really strange place and not in a cool/strange way. There are weird nautical and non-nautical mementos and objects inside and the sign out front when we walked in was advertising Mexican Jumping Beans. Weird, right?

After we managed to kill sometime for 20 minutes wandering along the pier, our water taxi was ready to ferry us to the other side.

At Pier 55, there's also an Argosy Harbor Cruise at a $20 per person that lasts about an hour. But the water taxi is only $3 per person and $1 for the ride back. It's advertised as a 12-minute trip each way but really it's about 15, almost close to 20 minutes. It leaves every hour on the hour on weekends from Seattle and every hour on the half-hour from West Seattle.

We were fortunate enough to have stunning weather on our last day. The sky was mostly clear, the sun was shining and the water was calm. And thankfully, there were no a-holes around yelling, "I'm on a boat!"

Once the boat docks in West Seattle, a free shuttle bus will take you to different neighborhoods like the Admiral district where you can see Seattle's own Statue of Liberty.

Our only problem was that because of the taxi's schedule we only had time to take the taxi there and back before we had to make our way to the airport. So plan on doing this when you have a whole day ahead of you to explore. And don't forget to bring your camera for great shots of Seattle's skyline.

Related Stories:
· Seattle Field Trip [Jaunted]
·King County Water Taxi [Official Site]

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