I’m sad to say it took us nearly 5 years to visit one of our neighboring cities, Tacoma. We’ve driven through it tons on our way to Portland or Olympic National Park but stopping? Exploring? Meh… it always seemed like we could find something better to do.
Be that as it may, I recently started following a small, woman-owned business in Tacoma which has a weekly rotating cheesecake special. They also have biscuit sandwiches. Yeah, this may or may not have been the start of my obsessive need to visit Tacoma.
We arrived at Side Piece Kitchen before they opened but it was fine. The car was warm and the conversation flowing. Okay, so the conversation was dark. I think we were discussing how predatory the funeral industry is but whatever. We eventually got cheesecake to sweeten our disposition on life.
Side Piece is everything I dreamed it would be. Amazing biscuit sandwiches. Fantastic cheesecake. A vibe that keeps on giving. 10 out of 10.
Up next on the agenda? A real-life version of chutes & ladders! Located near the ferry in Point Defiance Park, this feature was probably originally intended to wear out small children while waiting for the ferry. I’m not small nor were we going on the ferry but I certainly have some child-like tendencies so of course we went down each and every one of those slides. It had rained recently but it was totally worth the wet butts!
We drove around the park checking out the duck pond and gardens. We tried to do the entire scenic drive but it was closed for a 5k.
We accepted our destiny and headed off to check out a giant sundial. You’re right. I absolutely planned this trip around things I found on Atlas Obscura and I have no regrets. Well, except maybe for visiting a sundial when there’s no sun but still.
Another Atlas Obscura find is the Bridge of Glass. It’s a free art walk near the Glass Museum and an unknown to me history museum. We didn’t want to OD on museums so we didn’t go into either but the free art was fun to check out.
Our museum pick of the day was LeMay – America’s Car Museum. Chris and I have been to the car museum in Nashville and enjoyed it. This one is similar but probably a lot larger. There are 4 entire floors plus ramps between the floors FILLED with cars. I enjoyed it but I had my fill about 3 floors in.
They have a number of volunteers who are very much car buffs. One stopped us to share some trivia about how the headlights on a particular vehicle worked. Apparently, back in the day, not everyone was rich enough to afford electric lights on their vehicles. The poor folks had to rely on a rather unstable gas that had the propensity to explode rather willy-nilly. I can’t imagine why most of the vehicles in the museum had electric lights. It’s almost like something happened to make the others a bit more rare…
By this time our biscuit & cheesecake-fueled selves had run out of go so we headed to a Salvadorian restaurant, Balcon Express, for some absolutely delicious food. Get the pupusas. You will not regret it. Unfortunately, the food was too good and so there are no pictures. It was still a double win tho. We got great food and a hint for our next adventure: head to McMenamin’s and find the hidden bar.
I’m not ashamed to tell you that we struggled with this task. I even had “crystal clear” instructions on how to find it and I struggled. Whatever. There’s a tiki bar in the basement where we regrouped. The vibe at The Old Hangout is fabulous perhaps the best I’ve seen and the drinks were great. 10 out of 10.
Once we were once again sustained with food & booze, we took another shot at finding the hidden bar. We found it! Unfortunately, so had everyone else so we couldn’t get a drink there. Ah well. Time to head home while debating whether or not all of the McMenamin’s locations have hidden bars. What have we been missing?!
