Enjoyed 4th of July at a Beach House and Spent a Day in Downtown Seattle

My family was fortunate enough to spend our 4th of July weekend at a good friend’s beach house in Tulalip, WA - which is a town just north of Seattle. It was certainly nice to get out of the Phoenix heat and to enjoy a fun weekend of sun, beach, crab hunting, sand castle building, and of course fireworks.  Oh, and by the way, the Beach House is available to rent here on VRBO :)

At the Beach House on 4th of July

The day prior to heading back to the Valley of the Sun, we decided to spend the day in downtown Seattle. The Hubby and I had been there a few times, but this was a first for our boys. We had a fun-filled, packed day that everyone loved. I wanted to share our experiences in the event you have a trip planned to Seattle soon!

Of course we headed to Pike Place Market, had our photo taken “on the pig” – evidently this is what everyone does – and right inside the Market from the pig is the famous Pike Place Fish Market. We enjoyed looking at all of the fish on display as well as watching the fish being thrown! This you can’t miss!

Pike Place Fish Market

We continued to walk through the Market and looked at everything there is to offer – there is so much to see! If we hadn’t been leaving town the following day, I would have most certainly purchased a beautiful bouquet of flowers, they were SO reasonably priced!

For lunch we headed over to Cutters Crabhouse and enjoyed a delicious seafood lunch, right on the waterfront next to Pike Place Market.

Afterwards, we decided to check out the Seattle Aquarium and ended up purchasing a CityPASS for the day to cover a few attractions, it worked out great! The Aquarium was awesome – some of it was indoors, some outdoors – our boys LOVED the experience.

Seattle Aquarium

Next we headed over to the Argosy Cruises Seattle Harbor Cruise – this hour long trip around the harbor was perfect! We had snacks, drinks, and enjoyed the tour along with the fresh sea air!

View from Harbor Cruise

Our final stop for the afternoon was at the Seattle Great Wheel – this is a fun ferris wheel that takes you around 3 times to enjoy the sites of the water and downtown area from a different perspective. If you have kids – I’d highly recommend!

Seattle Great Wheel

View from Seattle Great Wheel

We enjoyed dinner at a delicious Italian restaurant, Il Fornaio, which was right down the street from where we stayed. Our meals were excellent and our boys especially enjoyed the yummy desserts they had to offer! I was excited to see an Affotago on the dessert menu as well – I had to indulge! I’ll do a blog post soon on this – simply put, this is a couple of scoops of vanilla ice cream topped with espresso and whipped cream, how can you go wrong with that?

Affogato from Il Fornaio

From the base of the Space Needle

The next morning we headed over to the Space Needle, with our CityPASS of course! Our boys loved it, there is a Space Needle app we downloaded as well to learn more about it.

It was the perfect 24 hours in downtown Seattle that was fun for everyone in our family!