It’s been a while since Amy and I took a quick trip outside of Vancouver, before opening the store, we frequently traveled everywhere from New York to Beijing, London to Shanghai and Taipei to San Fransisco.  We’ve been going full throttle trying to bring everything elegant and contemporary we’ve seen to Vancouver at very reasonable prices.

We decided to head down to Seattle to find a quality florist to recommend to our local customers.

All I remember is arriving at our store around 10 am to hear Fat Cat yelling for his food, then looking at the clock which all of a sudden showed 2 pm.

We quickly changed our plans from making it a day trip to a overnight trip. I went on  priceline.com, just to see how much a hotel night would cost us.  After browsing the listings, a decent hotel in downtown was looking pretty pricey.

I was wondering what William Shatner was trying to tell me, I clicked him and he told me I could “Name my own price”.  So I did, and got a 4 star hotel in downtown Seattle for $79!!  I recommend anyone going to the states to give this a try, if you have lots of time before your trip, low ball them until you get an accepted deal.

We made it downtown by 6 PM and were stuck in traffic long enough for Amy to find a good restaurant using the Urban Spoon iPhone app.

After shaking the iPhone, it recommended the Crab Pot Restaurant and Bar. It was amazing. We have video, but it’s too savage.  After seating us, the server tied bibs on to us and laid a few layers of paper down on the table. When our seafood was ready, they dumped the entire serving right on to our table!  No plates.  No cutlery. Amy and I didn’t mind though, we immediately started hammered away at the crab shells with the mallets they gave us. My fingers smelled like crab, butter and mussels until Monday.

Garden Party Travel Tip: Do not bring your first date here.

Here are some pictures I found on flickr:

This meal took us out so we retreated to the Westin Seattle downtown to pass out.

The next day, we set out to find all the flower shops that were rated the highest on Yelp.

Our conclusion after visiting the majority of the flower shops on Yelp’s top ten list, is that Vancouver residents are quite spoiled with high quality flowers and designs.  Before leaving though, we called Garden Party Floral Designs (www.gardenpartyflowers.COM) to see if they were open. It turns out they are a studio that specializes in corporate, special events and weddings without a retail store front location.  The lady who answered the phone was soo nice, and told us she gets many emails from people who are looking for us.  Check out their website, the flowers look the most gorgeous of all the shops we visited – great job TJ, see you February!

As we prepared to head back to Vancouver, we devoured a chowder soup sampler and dungeness crab roll from a place we walked by called Pike Place Chowder.  It was soooo good!