With faith in our T-cell immunity, we decided to take our long-planned vacation to Washington with Katy's family. Heather's Mom was in the midst of transitioning to a new nursing home, forcing Heather to arrive late and leave early. We lucked out with sunny weather as we toured the rain forests, islands, mountains, and beaches of the Evergreen State.
View from our flight in: Mt. Rainier rising above its usual cloak of clouds
Instead of flying, from our home we could have driven past the airport, turned right onto the start of I-90 West, and stayed straight for 3,000 miles until its terminus in Seattle
Thanks to a rescheduled 7AM flight, we arrived in Seattle in the afternoon in time to visit the Seattle Aquarium
Marine mammals were the attraction, such as harbor seals
The next morning we were up early for the first of our 4 car ferries around Puget Sound
This was the commuter line from Edmonds to Kingston on the Olympic peninsula
Up to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park
Three deer and one Deere
Lyla wanted us to stop in Port Angeles and find a dark alley where Bella could have been attacked by vampires
No luck on vampires or werewolves but we found bilingual signs with the native Klallam language
Up in the Sol Duc Valley of Olympic National Park the trees were beautiful
Sol Duc Falls was thundering
Nurse log!
Entry was limited to the hot springs and the cold pool
Mixing up the kids in the cars was win-win for the parents and kids
We caught the Port Angeles - Coupeville ferry and landed at Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve, which preserves the coast and prairies along picturesque Whidbey Island
Later that day we caught the Anacortes ferry out to San Juan Island
The San Juan islands archipelago sits between Vancouver Island, Canada and the northwest tip of Washington
Our house rental was adjacent to fields covered with blackberries, and not the big bland ones found in supermarkets, but the ripest sweetest most blackberry-y bites you've ever tasted
There were also enormous slugs. We named this pair Kit and Chaz.
We hiked around the rocks of the American Camp side of San Juan Island National Historical Park
Meanwhile Heather took a puddle jumper from Seattle
and waved to us way down by that lighthouse on the end of the island
These islands were almost part of Canada, but as opposed to the forceful establishment of the US southern border, the final dispute of the northern border was resolved peacefully. Now that we've been to the park sites at the northeast corner (Saint Croix Island, ME) and northwest corner of the continental US, do we have the resolve to tackle the southwest corner (Coronado NM in San Diego, CA) or - gulp - the southeast corner (Dry Tortugas NP, 70 miles SW of Key West, FL)?
What are we, mountain climbing? No, this was the gear for our whale watch. Besides the 9 of us there were only 2 other passengers and the flat calm seas made for perfect whale viewing.
We tracked a group of 5 orcas for most of the trip (see videos below). Fun facts about orcas: they form some of the tightest family bonds among mammals and families groups stay together their entire lives, with some children never leaving their mother's sides. Orcas can live 50-80 years. Their gestation period is 17 months. They never stop hunting and "sleep" by turning off one half of their brain at a time. Their favorite prey in the Puget Sound waters are harbor seals and porpoises. The pod that we were tracking made a kill and spat out the one porpoise part that they don't like eating. Can you identify this organ? Here's a hint - it floats. Yes, those are porpoise lungs.
Fog bank on the morning ferry back to the mainland
North Cascades National Park is a remote wilderness adjoining parks in Canada. Fortunately its Visitor Center is less remote just off the highway from the Anacortes ferry
Driving down the I-5 in Seattle, that's Mount Rainier
The Wellspring Spa hosts weddings in this amphitheater
panorama photo courtesy of Erin
Our big hike in Mt. Rainier was the Skyline Trail, a strenuous 1,700 vertical ft, 5.5 mile loop
Pardon the photo barrage, but the scenery was so spectacular
Hello marmot
Heather and Tessie took a detour up the trail with the summitters but found the glacier
At Panorama Point we could see the blown off top of Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood in Oregon
After our day on the mountain we headed to a restaurant run by a Nepalese family. This was the display inside the restaurant.
The fastest person to ascend Mount Everest, Lhakpa Sherpa, is also the owner of Wildberry Restaurant. Wait a minute...
As the fittest-looking person in the restaurant, he wasn't hard to find. Here he is, selling us Nepalese wool hats.
On the East Coast, I've seen signs for Hurricane Evacuation routes, like in the Outer Banks of NC, but never a Volcano Evacuation route. If Mount Rainier were to blow, would you really be able to hop in your car and drive to safety?
Since the main road is that white line coming off the southwest corner of the lahar field, unless you can outrun the lahar for 20 miles, you're going to be toast
Really, the World's Largest Egg?
Would've rather seen the World's Largest Chicken
Heading down to the Columbia River, it was clear what the dominant industry was. Revenue from timber outranks fishing and farming by at least a log unit. Maybe two.
Pun inspiration: Mike from travelknitdance.com
Tsunami Hazard Zone? Seriously! That's worse than the Volcano Zone! You'd better run, little man. Thanks to the New Yorker, I was aware of this risk and not a little disconcerted by the numbers. The Cascadia subduction zone averages massive ~9.0 magnitude earthquakes every 243 years. The last one was in 1700, 320 years ago. When the big one strikes there will be 10-30 minutes until the tsunami 20 to 100 feet high buries the Oregon and Washington coasts and everything in them. Listen for barking dogs because they will hear the compression waves before human alarm systems are activated. But you can't outrun a tsunami.
Here you can hold hands before the tsunami drowns you
At the mouth of the Columbia River lies Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, where the Corps of Discovery rested in the winter of 1805 before heading back East
Fort Clatsop was open to the public
and we learned all about the fur trade
The Fort-to-Sea trail was really cool in that after a couple of miles we reached an overlook. Instead of seeing it from the highway, our first view of the Pacific Ocean was human-powered, just like Lewis and Clark and the kidnapped Shoshone woman Sacajawea, and York the slave.
The 4 mile-long Astoria-Megler bridge over the Columbia River is the longest continuous truss bridge in North America
No room for bikes, pedestrians, or breakdowns on this bridge
It's tough to see oceanside sunsets on the East Coast, but I've seen them on the Gulf Coast of Florida and the outer tip of Cape Cod. Here's the West Coast real deal at Long Beach, Washington. The 28-mile stretch of sand claims to be the longest beach in the US. At ~55 degrees, the water temp was forbidding, even to the porpoises Erin and Charlie.
That's the World's Biggest Frying Pan. Is it next to a telephone pole or is that also the World's Largest Chopstick?
The kitsch shop held the elusive jackalope next to the even rarer Swamp Ape from the Florida Everglades
On our last day we rented bikes for the beautiful trail through the dunes
This is a replica of the carving by William Clark marking the turning point in his journey and ours, too
The scenery was great, but the bikes were total pieces of garbage. And five miles in, at the incorrectly named Cape Disappointment, I discovered that my car keys had fallen out of my pocket. Since we had locked everyone's luggage in my car in order to all pile into Brad's car, this presented a problem. It had the benefit of squelching all the kids' moaning about the bikes as they contemplated missing our flights due to a 9-hour forth and back and forth trip to Seattle to retrieve a new key. We completed our search pattern without joy until we got back to Brad's car, where the key was found on my seat.
Heading back to Seattle through the empty lands of western Washington we made an inspired stop for dinner in South Bend, dubbed the Oyster Capital of the World for the huge Pacific oysters pulled out of Willapa Bay.
These grilled oysters tasted as good as they looked. Requiring two bites, they resembled their dainty East Coast cousins in name only. A perfect finish to our tour of the beautiful, sunny, dry, and blessedly earthquake-free Pacific Northwest.
It is snacking on ice cubes hidden in its armpits
Horsing around
Orcas
Not rainier at Rainier
