Tacoma: Glass Museum and a bridge

After visiting Mt. Saint Helens on our recent trip to Canada, my SO and I stopped for a few days in Seattle. Tacoma is just a short drive south of Seattle, so we spent a day in Tacoma visiting the Museum of Glass and Point Defiance Park.

While the Museum of Glass was not very large, it did have artists blowing glass in itsHot Shop, an auditorium with a glass-blowing facility in the bottom. The visiting artist was blowing clear glass jars, and then writing on them with thin strands of colored glass:


Using a torch to melt a thin strand of colored glass onto a recently blown glass bottle.
The exhibits in the museum were neat (though had too many dogs for my taste), but what really excited me were these blown-glass sculptures of jellyfish I found in the gift shop:


That's all glass; there isn't actually a jellyfish in there.
If those had been a bit cheaper, I'd have one on my desk right now.

After going through the museum, we wandered around outside and found a lot more glass-based art, the highlight of which was this huge sculpture:


Giant sculpture.
The picture above was taken with my back to the sun. However, the sculpture looked far cooler when viewed with the sun behind it, as the translucent glass shone in dozens of hues of blue:


Ice in the sun.
After we left the Museum of Glass we visited Point Defiance Park, a large park that juts out into the Puget Sound. Point Defiance Park reminded us of Stanley Park in Vancouver; both parks were filled with lush forests and had multi-mile drives through them, complete with many stopping points for both sightseeing and hiking. One of our favorite stops was one where we could see the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge:


Look, it's still standing!
To see all my pictures from Tacoma, look at my Tacoma set on flickr.