What should I avoid in Seattle?

Cut the Space Needle first when Seattle is grey, and Seattle is often grey. Tickets run $35 to $45 depending on the time slot, but when the cloud sits low the 520-foot deck looks out at white fog: on 14 October the city was overcast at 14°C with 82% humidity. Check the Space Needle's own webcam before you pay, because on a clear evening it is worth the price. The Sky View Observatory on the 73rd floor of Columbia Center downtown sits roughly 380 feet higher, costs less, and has the Needle in its view. Kerry Park on Queen Anne Hill is free, and it frames the Needle against downtown with, on a lucky day, Mount Rainier behind it. Go around 6:15pm in mid-October for sunset and bring a layer, because the wind coming up from Elliott Bay feels cold and damp on bare hands.

Give Pike Place Market your morning, not your afternoon. By 11am on a summer Saturday the crowd at Pike Place Fish Market blocks the main arcade, and from May to October cruise passengers from Pier 66 and Pier 91 fill the lower levels. Arrive by 8:30am on a weekday: at that hour the stalls smell of roasting coffee, cold fish on crushed ice, and cut dahlias, and you can walk the length of the arcade in ten minutes. Skip the queue at the Starbucks at 1912 Pike Place: it is the oldest store still open, not the first one, which stood at 2000 Western Avenue until 1976, and the wait for a standard latte can pass 45 minutes. The Gum Wall in Post Alley deserves two minutes and smells of spearmint and wet brick. Daily Dozen Doughnut Company near the Pike Street entrance sells a hot paper bag of mini doughnuts for a few dollars.

Arrival is where first-timers lose the most money. A cab or rideshare from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to downtown tends to cost $45 to $65, takes 25 minutes on a quiet day, and can stretch to over an hour when I-5 jams after 3pm. The Link light rail 1 Line platform is about a 10-minute walk from baggage claim, past the airport parking garage, and the train reaches Westlake station in roughly 40 minutes for a flat $3 fare; buy an ORCA card or a ticket at the platform machine, or use the Transit GO Ticket app. For a stay in downtown, Belltown or Capitol Hill, skip the rental car: hotel parking currently runs $40 to $60 a night, the climbs on Queen Anne and Capitol Hill are steep, and Link, the Monorail and King County Metro buses cover every first-day stop. A Jetogo eSIM set up before landing means Google Maps works on the walk to the Link platform.

Lake Washington cruises from Kirkland and Lake Union sell a drive-by of Bill Gates's house in Medina, but from the water you see a lawn, a shoreline, and a lot of trees. Put that money toward the Washington State Ferries crossing from Colman Dock at Pier 52 to Bainbridge Island instead: it takes 35 minutes, costs about $10 for a walk-on round trip, and passes the whole downtown skyline, with the deck smelling of diesel and salt and the galley selling coffee for a few dollars. On safety, Seattle scores 6.8/10 for solo travelers (see the TTDI Solo-Safety Index). The weak spots for a visitor are Third Avenue between Pike and Pine streets and the blocks around 12th Avenue and South Jackson Street, where open drug use is common after dark, so walk First or Fourth Avenue instead. Car break-ins are the more likely loss, so leave nothing visible in a car parked at Discovery Park or Gas Works Park.