April 7, 2007
Olympic Sculpture Park
We visited Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park (OSP) a few week's ago. The kids, Toni and I really enjoyed it. I took the camera along and snapped a few photos, a couple of which turned out nice so I thought I'd share them. If you have the patience, you can click on each image to see the full picture. 
OSP is a huge outdoor park filled with gigantic sculptures from various artists. The space it inhabits occupies what was once an industrial area in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, on the shores of Puget Sound.
The park's landscape is spread across a variety of city elevations because of Seattle's hilly geography. Because of this, parts of the park are actually built above city roads; and you can actually peer through a large wall at one end of the park to look down on the traffic passing underneath. Porter and Fallon enjoyed peaking through these "arrow slits" at the city below us.
The combination of grand-scale sculpture, multiple levels, and surrounding industrial area gives the park a very interesting feeling, especially when combined with a cold Seattle winter drizzle, and sounds of ships passing in the nearby Sound.
It was great for the kids since there was plenty to explore, as we walked down the z-shaped pathway that leads through the park. Many of the walls in the park start off at foot-level and slowly grow in height as you walk down hill. Of course, Porter and Fallon took advantage of this fact to walk on top of any structure they could find. They loved wandering around, peaking through openings to see what was on the other side, walking in the gravel borders that lined the pathways, climbing on the walls to get a better vantage point. 
After walking around for a couple hours we decided to check out the indoor portion of the park which consists of a small cafe and some interesting sculptures that look like giant, irregular-shaped bee-hives, constructed out of materials similar to those cheap fold-out, chaise lounges you sometimes see next to a hotel pool. There were two of them, each suspended from the ceiling by heavy-duty cables. A few kids had climbed inside of them and were busy trying to figure them out. It didn't take long for Porter and Fallon to join in.
After a bit we decided to pack up and leave, heading back to the car for a quick ride back to Issaquah. The kids would eat lunch and take a nap, giving Toni and I a chance to catch our breaths.