Enrich Yourself With Seattle Museum Month

Seattle Museum Month (aka. February) isn’t the only reason to visit our American sister city, but it’s a pretty great one. We recently hopped on the Amtrak Cascades and spent a weekend exploring Seattle’s biggest travel deal of the year. —Kelsey Klassen

stay. With Seattle Museum Month in full swing, you have your pick of 55 participating hotels. Check into any one of them as part of the package, and you’ll receive 50 per cent off admission to more than 40 cultural institutions and museums. My husband and I chose the Thompson Seattle—a water-view luxury boutique hotel which just opened in summer 2016. The 158-room, Robb Report-endorsed escape has views for days, including of the famed Pike Place Market, the harbour’s glowing ferris wheel, and beautiful Puget Sound.

see. The very first stop on your Museum Month to-do list should be the Seattle Art Museum. Just a short walk from the hotel, this month’s exhibitions include a riveting trip back through time courtesy of African American history painter Jacob Lawrence, and 39 European and North American landscape masterworks. The free wi-fi and hushed respite from the cold are also a plus.

savour. A little déjeuner at the nearby Le Pichet is a tradition every time we are in the Emerald City. Warm up with an Lyon-style onion soup before giving your museum card a work out. Alternately, the newly opened Dueminuti pasta bar in trendy Capitol Hill puts a healthy, high-tech spin on traditional Italian fare. As one would expect from an Italian trattoria, the hospitality on our inaugural visit was second-to-none.

sip. Back at the Thompson, peruse the Pirelli coffee table book in the lobby and then head on up to the cosy rooftop bar, aptly named The Nest. We sipped on pour-overs and snacked on salty popped corn as the Super Bowl unfolded on the lounge’s lone TV. Meanwhile, neither the rain nor the Patriots’ unthinkable comeback could distract from the bar’s unbeatable vistas.

don’t miss. Anyone who has taken a selfie under the floral ceiling at the Bellagio knows the work of Dale Chihuly. The ouevre of the American glass painter and sculptor (and Pacific Northwest native son) doesn’t stop there, though. Use your museum card to gain entry to his eponymous exhibition space, the Chihuly Garden and Glass—filled to bursting with the most stunning displays of glass art this side of Murano, Italy. Fun fact: In 1996, Mr. Chihuly was commissioned to suspend his iconic hand-blown chandeliers over the canals of Venice, some of which can be seen on display here.