The Space Needle pierces the sky like a concrete question mark, and Pike Place Market thrums with its orchestrated chaos of flying fish and flower vendors.
But these are Seattle’s front door, not its soul.
After years wandering this city’s fog-softened edges and rain-slicked neighborhoods, I know that the real Seattle lives in the spaces between the postcards.
My name is Brendon Pack, and I’m proud to have called Seattle home for most of my life. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Washington, Michael G. Foster School of Business in 2003. And after many career adventures, I helped found 1-800Accountant in 2013 with my friend Mike Savage.
Today, I live a short drive east of Seattle proper in one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, Bellevue, Washington.
Bellevue stretches across the hills east of Lake Washington like a carefully planned dream of what an American city could become. Where Seattle embraces its gritty, coffee-stained authenticity, Bellevue polishes itself to a gleaming shine—wide boulevards lined with cherry trees, glass towers that reflect the Cascade Mountains, and shopping districts that feel more like outdoor museums than commercial strips.
The downtown core pulses with the quiet energy of tech money and international business. Microsoft’s influence seeps through everything, from the sleek condominiums rising along Northeast 8th Street to the Tesla-heavy parking lots at Lincoln Square.
But Bellevue isn’t just a corporate bedroom community.
Meydenbauer Bay Park offers walking trails where great blue herons fish in the shallows while seaplanes taxi overhead, and the Bellevue Botanical Garden unfolds 53 acres of Pacific Northwest paradise where rhododendrons bloom in impossible profusion each spring.
The city’s international character shows itself in unexpected ways—authentic Korean barbecue tucked between luxury car dealerships, dim sum parlors where Mandarin and Cantonese mix with English, and grocery stores where you can find everything from Vietnamese dragon fruit to Ethiopian berbere.
It’s a place where old-growth forests bump up against manicured suburbs, where you can hike the Coal Creek Trail in the morning and catch a symphony performance at Meydenbauer Center in the evening.
Bellevue represents the Pacific Northwest’s quieter ambitions—prosperity without pretension, nature preserved alongside progress, and the peculiar beauty of a city that managed to grow up without losing its view of the mountains.
If you’re familiar with my website, you know that I’ve long discussed the importance of food shelters, and ways that we can give back to help those in need.
Now, I’d like to share my love of adventure and travel to discover new places to visit and new ways to visit them.
So what better way to launch this new blog section than to start with the city I know best: The Emerald City, also called Seattle.
Let’s take a trip.
Hidden Seattle: A Local’s Guide
The Underground Current
I descend into the Pioneer Square Underground not for the sanitized “Underground Tour”, but because Jorge, my favorite barista at Victrola on Capitol Hill, once mentioned that the old pneumatic postal system tubes still snake beneath our streets.
“You can hear them sometimes,” he told me, “late at night when the buses stop running.” I never hear the phantom mail, but standing in those buried sidewalks, I understand something about Seattle’s relationship with its own history—how we literally built ourselves on top of our mistakes and kept climbing.
The real discovery comes from ducking into the Merchant’s Cafe afterward, reportedly the city’s oldest restaurant. The bartender, a woman with silver hair and knowing eyes, serves bourbon while rain drums the windows above. “Most people walk right past,” she tells me. “They’re looking for the new shiny thing. But some of us remember when this whole neighborhood was full of sailors and loggers and people who came here to disappear.”
Just down the street, is the famous Central Saloon, also known as the birthplace of grunge music. It’s here that Nirvana played its first club concert. Many of the other bands now infamous to that ground-breaking rock scene of the early 1990s got their start or played here including Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Mother Love Bone.
The Central Saloon in the Pioneer Square of downtown Seattle was host to Nirvana’s first-ever live concert.
Neighborhoods That Breathe
Capitol Hill gets the press, but I spend my mornings in Greenwood, where the Aurora Avenue strip malls give way to craftsman houses with gardens that sprawl like wild thoughts.
At the Baranof, a dive bar that serves surprisingly good fish and chips, I meet retired Boeing workers who tell stories about building 747s while the city transformed around them.
Further north, in Bitter Lake, I love showing people the hidden gem of Bitter Lake Park, where a wooden boardwalk cuts through wetlands that feel impossibly far from the urban sprawl just blocks away. Great blue herons stalk through the reeds while joggers pound the Burke-Gilman Trail, two rhythms of the same city overlapping like jazz.
Water and Mountains, Always
Seattle’s secret is that it’s really a series of islands connected by bridges and hills, and the water is always there, even when you can’t see it. I take the water taxi to West Seattle not for the skyline views (though they’re spectacular), but to walk the tide pools at Lincoln Park during low tide.
Purple sea urchins cluster in the rocks like living jewels, and the ferries majestically launch to Vashon and other nearby islands.
On clear days—and there are more than people tell you—I climb to the top of the Georgetown steam plant, now converted to studios and event spaces.
From the roof, you can see Mount Rainier looming like a sleeping giant, and the industrial Duwamish River winding toward Elliott Bay which abuts the Seattle marina walk and the famous Pike Place Market up the hill. It’s a view that reminds you that the city was built on timber, salmon and ships, not just software.
Speaking of Pike Place, it remains the nation’s oldest, continuously working farmer’s market. Yes, it’s a tourist trap, and a place to avoid on many summer days when cruise ships dock in the harbor below.
But, if you’re looking for the freshest locally-caught fish and finest fresh produce, it’s an experience that can’t be beat.
Day Trips That Change You
An hour east, the Snoqualmie Valley unfolds like a green prayer. I drove the back roads through Carnation and Fall City, stopping at roadside stands selling corn and apples, feeling the city’s grip loosen with each mile.
At Snoqualmie Falls, I skipped the official viewing platform (where you see the Falls as they appeared in the opening credits of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks) and hiked down to the base of the cascade, where mist rises like incense and the roar drowns out everything but the present moment.
But the revelation is the aforementioned Vashon Island, reached by a twenty-minute ferry ride that feels like time travel. I rented a bike at the dock and pedaled through forests that seem untouched, past llama farms and artists’ studios tucked into cedar groves.
At Point Robinson, a lighthouse peers across the water toward Seattle’s glittering towers, close enough to touch but worlds away. I ate blackberries from the bushes and watched container ships slide past like mechanical whales.
With a view across Puget Sound to see Mount Rainer in the distance, the Point Robinson lighthouse remains a beautiful relic of the past.
It was also here that I discovered one of the six unique trolls built by artist Thomas Dambo using only artifacts he collected that washed up onshore in the Pacific Northwest.
North to Whidbey Island proved equally transformative. Deception Pass Bridge spans a narrow gorge where tidal currents churn the water into jade foam. I stood on the span at sunset, watching eagles ride thermals while the Olympic Mountains turned purple against the western sky.
The Vashon Troll is one of six art pieces created by Thomas Dambo using only artifacts collected from onshore debris collected in the Pacific Northwest.
The Night Shift
Seattle after dark reveals different secrets. I spent an evening at the Comet Tavern in Capitol Hill, where punk rock ghosts mingle with tech workers unwinding from long days debugging code. The bartender, covered in tattoos that tell the story of the neighborhood’s evolution, mixed surprisingly sophisticated cocktails while Nirvana played on the sound system.
But it was the late-shift at 13 Coins, the retro diner near the airport, that became my favorite after-hours ritual. Open 24 hours since 1967, it serves perfect eggs Benedict to night-shift nurses, cab drivers, and insomniacs who can’t sleep through Seattle’s summer twilight that lasts until nearly 10 PM.
Rain as Revelation
Everyone warns you about the rain, but nobody mentions how it transforms the city. Seattle’s true character emerges in the gray. Colors become more saturated—the red brick of Pioneer Square, the green moss that furs every surface, the silver sheen on puddles that reflect neon and streetlights in abstract expressionist smears.
I spent one soggy afternoon at the Fremont Sunday Market, where vendors huddled under tarps selling vintage vinyl and handmade pottery.
The rain became part of the experience, drumming on canvas while locals browsed undaunted, coffee cups steaming in their hands. A woman selling hand-carved wooden bowls told me, “The rain doesn’t stop life here. It just makes everything more intentional.”
Coming Home to a Place You’ve Never Been
This isn’t a city that seduces you with obvious charms. It’s a place that earns your affection slowly, through accumulation of small revelations.
The perfect cup of coffee at a counter where the barista knows your name.
The bookstore where you can spend three hours browsing without anyone bothering you.
The trail that leads to a viewpoint you never knew existed, where the whole city spreads below like a secret worth keeping.
I came to Seattle expecting rain and coffee and grunge music nostalgia. I found a city that teaches patience, that rewards attention, that understands the beauty in everyday rhythms played against the backdrop of mountains and water and endless sky.
Some cities you visit. Others, if you’re lucky, visit you back and become your home.
