GABST Day 1: Champagne, ice cream and mini-golf

Something very very bad is about to happen.

That’s the only conclusion I can come to after spending a day in Seattle during which the sun shone incessantly and the temperature never dipped below 65 degrees. You guys, I got a sunburn. In Seattle. I mean, the other shoe has to drop, right?

So Great American Bookstore Tour, Day 1, went swimmingly. At first pass, Seattle reminds me a great deal of Chicago, which is to say that the people are nice, it’s very clean and slightly less walkable than you’d like it to be (although, in Seattle’s defense, I am also a truly atrocious navigator, managing to turn what should have been a 1-mile, half-hour walk into a 1.5-hour sojourn through vaguely industrial and highway overpass-y areas that looked more like the outskirts of a sad suburb than the heart of a beloved northwestern city.)

Anywho, after perusing Pike Place Market (eating brioche and drinking 1 p.m. champagne cocktails counts as perusing) my travel-mate and I walked up to South Lake Union, where we boarded — like eager children — something called the Fremont Sunday Ice Cream Cruise. Yes, it’s pretty much what you think: We sat on a boat and learned some Seattle history while eating ice cream.  (I also came to the conclusion that I’m going to need a houseboat.)

From there it was back to the hotel for a brief respite (read: me falling facedown on the bed and wondering how I’m going to keep this up for 14 days) before heading out to Smash Putt, a genius suggestion from an ST reader. Smash Putt is like if Mad Max created a mini-golf course in the basement of an early 90s videogame nerd. It’s like putt-putt meets Max Headroom. Best of all, they let you shoot golf balls out of pressurized air guns into various nets and old machinery and pieces of metal. So, not your typical Easter Sunday (though, I guess it depends on your family).

Tomorrow we move on to the main affair: Elliot Bay Book Co.