Day 3

Our mission today was to explore the area north of Queen Anne where the Inn is. We successfully used the bus to get to Mars Hill Church for the 9am service. We really enjoyed the ministry of Mark Driscoll. I’ll write another post about my thoughts about his sermon, which was timely for us in the place we find ourselves. We weren’t surprised to find the majority of its attendees to be just like us, 30s w/young families. It was refreshing to be a face in the crowd and in a different environment to worship. I love to see how different parts of the universal church body worship in uniqueness. The campus pastor focused the service at the beginning, the band led in one song, and then we heard from God’s Word. I loved the flow of the service and the opportunity to respond in communion and more worship after hearing from God in an authentic, real, and alive way. Parents were encouraged to get their children from the nursery and join them in the final worship time. Communion itself was distinctive as we went forward to a station with small squares of bred that could be dipped in goblets of wine or juice, and then ate on our own. It’s amazing how much more meaningful something can become when it’s just a little bit out of the ordinary (at least for me). But, I guess you have to be willing to experience God in unique ways or those changes could be distracting.

From there, we caught another bus and headed to the Chittenden Locks. I’ve never seen anything like those before but remember Miss K from middle school social studies describing them vividly, so it was fun to observe them in action. There wasn’t much action on the water since it was Sunday, but a couple tugboats went through the locks while we watched. No fish on the fish ladders swimming upstream, but we weren’t surprised by that.
The bus took us to another little neighborhood called Ballard. We stopped at a pizzeria for lunch before walking through a little farmer’s market of sorts with lots of organic vegetables, meat and seafood as well as other homemade items. We returned to the Inn for a typical Sunday afternoon rest.

On a side note, we found Google Maps to be extremely helpful in figuring out public transit, at least in Seattle. Plug in your start and stop points, then look for “Use Public Transit” at the top of the left sidebar. Under “Options” you can input the date and time you want to leave or arrive, and it will give you all the bus numbers, stops, times, etc. Without this it was next to impossible to figure out what buses to take and what times they would come and go. I imagine this may be helpful on rare occasions in the future, but especially if we ever decide to be a one-vehicle family.

Later, we walked to the Space Needle and took a ride to the top. It was neat to see the city after dark. However, if it wasn’t seemingly the most popular Seattle attraction, we could have skipped paying the $32 to get both of us to the top. And to make sure we ate just about every kind of food on the trip, we enjoyed Thai cuisine from a local Queen Anne restaurant before heading back to the Inn for the night.