The Center for Wooden Boats
As you read this I am in New Orleans, but I pre-wrote this post reminiscing about the Center for Wooden Boats, a boat museum I visited in 2022 on a vacation to Seattle.
Here's me at the Center for Wooden Boats:
Here's some of the boats:
I was a massive boat liker in middle school, high school, and college. Starting in 7th grade, I saw Master and Commander in theaters, then promptly went out and read every single one of the Aubrey/Maturin books. I also learned how to operate a sailboat. I used to rent a Sunfish for a dollar an hour at a lake near my house and rip around on it in the summer. On our 2022 vacation to Seattle, when we saw there was a historic boat museum on Lake Union, I made attendance mandatory for us!
It's a great museum! They restore boats in the large building I'm standing next to in the picture above, and there's loads of little info stations about how the boat restoration process works. Unfortunately, I don't have good pictures of that. I was too busy quoting boat facts to my husband to take any pictures.
The museum is on Lake Union, and you can actually RENT a lot of the wooden boats and row them around on the lake yourself.
Seattle residents, let me repeat: you live in the same city as a historic boat museum that lets you sail the boats!!!!!!!
It is a living museum, and the boats are in the water, and they're meant to be sailed. Unfortunately, we didn't know about this cool detail when we visited the museum... and just as we were entering the museum, we each consumed an edible. So we were in no position to sail the historic sailboats. We've decided that we need to go back sober someday and sail the boats ourselves.
I'm posting this just to show my cool pictures of the museum, really. Here's another. Because the museum is on Lake Union, we got to watch sea planes land in front of us for hours... so here is my not-very-good picture of a sea plane cruising toward the museum.
One of the most important things we took way from the Center for Wooden Boats was our "Center for Wooden Boats" t-shirts, one red, one blue. We wear them all the time, sometimes together. In fact, I'm wearing mine right now, as I write this. They're delightful. One of my most treasured possessions. Here is a picture Brendon drew of me wearing it:
And the shirt in real life:
Anyway, it's a good museum. You should go!!