Lodging

Budget

 • Seattle Green Tortoise Hostel, 1525 Second Avenue, (206) 340-1222 or 1-888-424-6783. A Seattle backpacker institution which also runs festive low-budget bus tours to Mexico and Central America.
 • The Seattle Hostel, 84 Union Street, Seattle WA 98101, about 2 short blocks to Pike Public Market, is an excellent base for exploring Seattle. It also close to all the great Seattle attractions: Pioneer Square, walking distance to the new Seattle Central   More...

Get Out

Boating

If you're staying anywhere near downtown, the ferries hardly seem like "getting out" since they leave from a pier at the south end of the waterfront, an easy and interesting walk from downtown.

 • Take a Washington State ferry to Bremerton and back. Almost 2 hours on the water, in a place as scenic as the Aegean Sea, walk-on passengers a little under $6 round trip. (A commercial ferry, passenger-only, is a bit more expensive and aimed primarily at   More...

Getting In

By plane

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, (Airport code: SEA), called "SeaTac" by locals, connects Seattle to all regions of the world, with especially frequent transpacific routes. Alaska Airlines provides something approximating discount air fare to and from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California. There are several choices for getting from the airport to the city center:

 • Taxi - The trip is about 20 minutes by taxi ($25 - $35); catch   More...

Getting Around

Navigating

Seattle's street designations make sense once you understand them, but unless you do understand them, you can end up many miles away from your destination. All North-South streets are labeled "Avenues" while East-West streets are labeled "Streets". The city is roughly divided into a 3 by 3 grid with nine directional sectors (i.e. N, S, NE, NW, etc) Street addresses in each sector are written with the area name BEFORE the street's number, e.g. NE 45th Street or NE   More...

Districts

Seattleites nearly always describe a location in terms of its "neighborhood." This is partly because of a potentially confusing system of street addresses (see Get Around). The breakdown into neighborhoods is informal and mutates over time, and while there are often signs on major arterial roads to let you know that you are "entering" a particular neighborhood, the placement of these signs is arbitrary. Still, knowing what neighborhood you're looking for can be a good sanity check   More...

Seattle

Seattle, Washington, sometimes called the Emerald City, is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest. The city is a green gem, with water and trees everywhere famed for its rainy weather, and on clear days, spectacular views of the Olympic Mountains across the Puget Sound to the west, and Mount Rainier and the Cascades to the east.   More...