With a very full day of taking in the sights yesterday, today we started it somewhat slower with a relaxed breakfast at the diner up the road at 10:30. It seemed like everyone in Queen Anne had the same idea as it was very busy which unfortunately meant it was slow. Oh well we’re on holidays, so sitting and chatting was fine.

USS Turner Joy – After a cruisy morning we made our way across to Bremerton on the ferry to have a look at the Navy Destroyer the USS Turner Joy named after Admiral Charles Turner Joy. Apparently the USS Joy didn’t have the right ring to it for a Navy Destroyer so they incorporated the Admiral’s middle name into the ships designation. This ship was built in the late 1950’s and participated for the whole period of the Vietnam conflict. No the ship is set up as a permanent memorial and allows people to take a peak at what it must have been like to serve on one of these ships.

There were a couple of vets onboard so it was really good to get their perspective on serving on this ship.

Glen’s rating – if you like boats and navy history you’ll have a blast.

Suquamish Museum – From the Navy ship we drove to the Suquamish Museum and Chief Seattle’s gravesite – who the city of Seattle was named after. Chief Seattle seemed very progressive and recognised that Europeans were here to stay so worked at how best to work with them rather than fighting against them. He even helped them identify the best land areas to settle.

The Suquamish language is complex and the written version that was created is just as complex. Here is an example.

On the wall of the museum is Chief Seattle’s speech which is renown and unfortunately as we only got there 30 minutes before closing I really didn’t get an opportunity to read everything fully.

I have since tried to locate a copy of the speech as I am very interested to see what it says as many people have mentioned it and how progressive and influential it was. However after a little bit of hunting around there doesn’t seem to be consensus as to what the actual true speech is as there are a number of variants out there and each are an interpretation or made fit into a purpose. While I don’t like sourcing wikipeadia as a source there is some interesting information on this topic around the speech – link.

That being said here is a link to Smith’s version of Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech from the Centre for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington.

Glen’s rating – great for those wanting to learn more about Indigenous history.

The canoe features very prominently in their culture and I was quite taken with these 10 rules and how broadly they apply.

After paying our respects at Chief Seattle’s grave we were back in the car and heading back.

Our only real drama for the day came when we went to drive back to Queen Ann as we planned to go across on the ferry but it turned out that half of Seattle had come across the bay to enjoy the day and now wanted to alll come back via the ferry. The line of cars to get on the ferry would have been many miles long. Given that we had a 8:15 dinner reservation and we didn’t wanted to wait a couple of hours to get home we drove back via Tacoma. Way longer but we got back with 3 minutes to spare bulling into Rays at 8:12pm

After high recommendation we had dinner at Rays Boathouse which was an absolute suburb meal. Absolutely suburb. We may not be able to eat for the next few days as the price was somewhat over our normal budget but heck it was nice. I don’t know how they cooked the scallops but they were sensational. And to add to the extraordinary meal we had a late sitting so we got to sit and watch the sun go down over the bay – million dollar views.