Somewhere between the fishmonger hurling a forty-pound salmon over your head and the ferry horn cutting through the fog on Elliott Bay, Seattle stops feeling like a city you’re visiting and starts feeling like one you’ve always sort of known. It’s a place built on contradictions that somehow work: a coffee-obsessed, tech-money city that still closes up early, a waterfront town that hosted the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the same hotel a decade apart, a fine-dining institution that once served burgers from a drive-in when the power went out and didn’t miss a beat.
Four days is enough to get a real feel for all of it: enough time for a ferry ride, a fish market, a splurge dinner, and at least one 2 a.m. burger stop you won’t be able to fully explain to people back home, and won’t want to.
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