What to do With Only Four Hours to Tourist in Seattle

Being an East Coast transplant in Seattle, I get visitors out here a lot. Whether it is my sister coming to visit for the weekend, or a friend from high school only passing through on a layover to Hawaii San Francisco, taking people touristing is a pretty normal part of my life.

The good part doing this on repeat is that I now have Seattle touristing down to a “T”.

Whether you have 30 minutes, 3 hours, or 3 days, I have the capacity to plan activities to fit your time-frame and make your stay in Seattle no matter how long or short memorable.

This time around, we were working with about 4 hours. We were planning to head to the market, but our guests were running far behind schedule and it was a Sunday with the market closing about 30 min. So with a little improv. we quickly changed our plans to hit two places: Seattle Center for sightseeing and the waterfront for dinner.

Seattle Center is a pretty obvious first hit since you can accomplish a lot while right there based on your guests’ preferences. This would include seeing or riding the Seattle Space Needle, MPOP, the Seattle Armory, the Science Museum, and the Chihully Glass Museum.

We parked next door to MPOP and went to the Chihuly Glass Museum first. This exhibit is very modern and impressive to guests seeing it for the first time. It also has some great photo opportunities since the museum has outdoor exhibits where you can actually catch Chihuly glass and the Seattle Space Needle in the same shot! They host live glass blowing tutorials outdoors (under cover) which is pretty fun to watch too.

Next for dinner, we headed to the Crab Pot on the waterfront!

Why the Crab Pot, you may ask?

Well, in this scenario it was my husband’s family that was here visiting from Mexico. They wanted to try some American food that was unlike what they could get back home. Of course you can’t take them to get burgers and fries, and a lot of food available here is relative to countries other than the U.S. (for example all the asian food in Seattle… teriyaki, sushi, thai, Chinese, etc.). So, this to me is a fun experience to go have a very PNW Seafood dinner served to you in a way unlike you would ever get at any other restaurant! In case you have never been to the Crab Pot before, they literally cook you a seafood feast then just dump it on top of your table for the family to dig into!

The other nice part about this location is that it is close to a lot of shops on the waterfront… we did experience some longer wait times trying to get a table, so we shopped at Pirates Booty while they were grabbing us a table, and afterwards we walked around the corner to get some ice cream at a shop on the strip.

So, if you have a day or less to burn in Seattle, give these places a try and let me know what you think!

Happy Travels!

XO – Abbey Co.