Hotel information

It seems like a good idea to have most of our guests staying close to each other, our place, and to the interesting tourist stuff. As of right now, we have block booking arrangements with three area hotels: the Edgewater, the Ramada, and the Sixth Avenue Inn.

Note to people involved with the ceremony (parents, attendants, etc): please check with us before you book anything, because we may have already made arrangements for you.

All three of the hotels are quite close to downtown, Seattle Center, our place, the reception venue, and are within the special area in which you can take the bus for free for much of the day. We went and had a look at them, and didn't see anything alarming. All of the prices below are before hotel tax, which is an alarming 15.6%.

Ramada Inn Seattle

The Ramada is about midway between downtown and our place- here's a map to the reception venue from it. The rate for a non-smoking double room is $99.00 per night, and you must reserve the room by the 14th of August to get that rate. It has a restaurant attached, and is a short stumble from what Eldan and I have affectionately termed the Tom Douglas District. It is also next door to Top Pot Doughnuts, which is a tasty Seattle institution. You can book a room by calling +1 (206)441-9785 and saying that you're with the Minch-Goldenberg wedding.

Sixth Avenue Inn

This is one or two blocks further from downtown, our place and the reception venue than the Ramada (map to the reception venue), but the attached restaurant looked a little nicer, and they made us a special website where you can book your room. The rate that they gave us is $109.00 per night, for a non-smoking room double room, and is good until July 29th, so it's to your advantage to make a reservation before then. You can book it on this website, or by calling +1 (206)441-8300 and saying you're with the Minch-Goldenberg wedding.

The Edgewater

This is the place where the reception will happen, and it's also two blocks from our building. We have a block of rooms guaranteed for the evening of the reception, for $209 per night. It's a very nice hotel, but as it's quite expensive, most of our guests probably don't want to stay there. You can make reservations online, but we haven't gotten the groupID or whatever it is we need to have to make sure that you get the group rate, so the best thing to do would be to call them up and say that you're in town with the Minch-Goldenberg wedding. Their number is 1 (800)624-0670 inside the US, and +1 (206)728-7000 everywhere else. Or, you can let us know that you'd like a room, and we can deal with it for you.

If none of these strike your fancy, let us know, and we can recommend something.

Special thanks goes to my mom, for making the arrangements with the Ramada and the Sixth Avenue Inn.

Bumbershoot

As both of our mothers have noticed in the past couple of weeks, Seattle's annual music and arts festival—Bumbershoot—has been inconsiderate enough to pick our wedding day for its start date. This is actually both good and bad news.

The bad news is that once tickets go on sale, it might become hard to find hotel rooms in town. Last year the tickets didn't go on sale till mid-June, the line-up wasn't announced until July, and publicity didn't start in earnest until the summer, so it's no cause for panic, but it's another reason that it would be better to book rooms sooner rather than later. We have a block of rooms at the Edgewater, and Melinda's mum is kindly organising a block for us in another hotel about half a mile away, so please get in touch with us when you want to make arrangements.

The good news is that it's likely to be a good festival, with an impressive line-up, so you might want to go. I've never actually been, but Melinda had fun last year, and here's a review from a few years earlier. They will be selling one- and two-day tickets, and because the festival venue is really close to our reception venue, it would work well to stay in one place and spend Friday with us and the weekend at Bumbershoot.

Greater Seattle orientation

We've had some people asking whether they should stay in Seattle or elsewhere in the greater Seattle area when they come for the wedding. We would strongly recommend Seattle itself (either downtown or Belltown), for two main reasons:

1. The reception venue is in Belltown and very close to downtown; we live in the same area, and we're likely to have the ceremony itself close by too.
2. Personal bias: we think downtown Seattle is much more interesting than the rest of the metropolitan area; so much so that we chose to live near it even though it gives Melinda a fairly long commute to work.

The main thing is that if you stay on the west side (looking back at that map, the ribbon lake in the middle is Lake Washington, and eastside and westside are relative to that) you'll have a much easier time getting to everything. The two bridges across the lake create a significant traffic bottleneck, whereas once you're on the west side most things you might want to go to can be walked between.