If your institution’s travel budget for this fiscal year has not been decimated and you still plan to go to ACRL’s 14th National Conference in Seattle – I’m going and I hope you’ll be there too – the New York Times Travel Section has a great article all about “the other side” of Seattle. It covers lots of places to go and things to see that you won’t find just walking back and forth from your hotel to the convention center. From the article:
Ballard and Fremont, once cities in their own right, are now Seattle neighborhoods of a particularly independent-minded kind. They’re close together, though not contiguous, and if you travel to either of them today, you’ll encounter a unique character that still resists complete assimilation — Nordic and proudly maritime in Ballard; arty and free-spirited in Fremont. Each is undergoing a kind of 21st-century renaissance, with shops and restaurants moving in, and a new, often young crowd arriving to live or just to play. But in either one, you can still lose yourself so thoroughly that you will barely even remember you’re in the same town as the Space Needle.
What’s really kind of nice is that for the sections on places to eat, see, etc., if you look at the comments you can see that the locals have chimed in with lots of “go check out this restaurant in Ballard that just opened” information that that will not be found in the standard Seattle travel guides. Of course I know that all you super-dedicated academic librarians will be spending the bulk of your time in the programs, making deals with vendors and otherwise formulating strategic plans in your interest groups. But if you do get plan to save a little free time to explore Seattle you should definitely print out and keep this NYT travel article in your conference bag.
Fremont has some great restaurants and coffee shops. Also a big statue of Lenin. Oh, and don’t forget the troll that lives under the Aurora bridge – http://tinyurl.com/6z8k63.