This afternoon we decided to go out for the day and headed over to North Seattle to Ballard Locks.  The locks link Lake Union (that also goes to Lake Washington), with Elliott Bay and ultimately the Pacific.  The locks are pretty busy and open and close daily multiple times.  If you want to ride through a lock there’s an Argosy cruise that takes you from Elliott Bay to Lake Union and they you get a bus back to Seattle’s water front.  We did the cruise a few years ago and it’s pretty cool.

But today we were their on the dock side watching the boats go through.  When we got there the main large lock (there are two one massive one and one small one) was empty.  They were just lowering the water level to let boats enter from Lake Union.  The first boat to come along was this massive tug boat called the Western Titan.  The bridge in Ballard had to raise to let the tug boat through (I got a great picture of that as well) and then moored up in the lock ready for the water to rise.

However being first is bad, as it takes around an hour to fill the lock up and raise the water level, so the guys on the boat got comfortable and sat back to wait.  In the interim they had to put up with loads of people with cameras taking their picture.  In the image below you can see the Western Titan at the front and a load of smaller boats in the lock behind.  This lock is HUGE and can hold a lot of vessels, it would have been nice to see them rise up and sail out but Abi was cold so we left before the rear lock gate closed.

These locks are really cool and definitely worth a visit Ballard also seems like a nice place to live – loads of bars and restaurants and trendy shops (Lisa liked it anyway).  They have some botanical gardens there too (photographed them as well) and a fish ladder for Salmon who want to swim up river to spawn.  But more about that in a future posting.

After visiting Ballard Locks we went to Red Mill Burgers across the road and Carter and Master Chief fell in love – with a Double Bacon Cheese Berger.