TravelStream™ news feed for member mlloyd on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/mlloyd en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:55:11 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/6/1251334823/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/6/1251334823/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/6/1251334823/tpod.html Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:55:11 -0400 A Visit to Temperance State Park in Minnesota

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Tofte, Minnesota, United States

"Did you feed the cats?" I ask Julie as we approach the lake for which town of White Bear Lake is named, about 20 miles from home. It's Friday morning, and we're on the way to our cabin near Finlayson, MN for a three day weekend.

“No, I thought you did.”

“Well, I heard you doing something with the food, so I thought you fed them.”

Luckily, we have someone coming in the next day to look after the cats, and a quick call and the promise of a hamburger convinces her to come in an extra day. We won't have to drive back, like we did on our very first trip to the cabin in December, 2006 where I forgot the keys and only realized it halfway there.

When we arrive at the cabin a couple of hours later, we are greeted by a doe and her fawn, still young enough to have spots, sauntering up the driveway. Julie stops the car, and the doe turns to look at us, clearly uncertain about what to do. She peers through the windshield, twitches her ears, takes a step away, then stops. More ear twitching, and a quick scratch, hind leg to ear, and then she decides we are not-a-good-thing. She trots up the driveway to the nearest deer trail, her baby right behind. Within seconds they are hidden in the alder hell.

As always, we start our visit with a tour of the trees we’ve planted over the last couple of years. All seem to be thriving, or at least surviving, except for some that Valinda (our friend and third co-owner of the cabin) got by mail order. Trees by mail order just doesn’t seem right to me, somehow. Of the dozen tiny pines she got last year, all died except one, and it looks like we’ll have about the same success rate with this year’s lot. Some of the other trees she ordered are doing better, however.

Next, Julie gets to work ripping thistle from the ground. I don’t like getting pricked by their thorny leaves, but Julie hates thistle with a passion. She’s trying to pull up every single thistle plant on the property, which will take, I estimate, about 107 years. My nemesis is the reed canary grass. It’s totally invasive, gradually turning the soil into mats of roots so that nothing else can grow. We have a lot of it already, and it’s spreading into the native grasses. Thistle competes with the reed canary grass on our “back 40” (more like three acres), so I think it should be left alone there. To humor me, Julie limits the thistle eradication program in that part of the property to the areas near our paths, but I can tell she really wants to kill them all.

Soon I’m ready for an adventure, so I suggest we kayak. I go in first and head upstream to the lake. Between the river and the lake is a concrete barrier which we call the dam. Today the river is very high, so there’s only a few inches difference between it and the lake. Usually we portage the kayaks if we want to go on the lake, but I decide I’m going to try to go over the dam. Paddling as hard as I can, I charge the oncoming current and then I’m up and over with a grinding thump. Well, sort of. I discover I’m stuck on top of the dam. I paddle and poke and wiggle and do everything I can think of to get loose, and nothing is working. I fear I’m going to have to wait for Julie to rescue me, but that’s just too humiliating to contemplate, so I use the paddle like a pole and push with all my strength until I pop free.

Wow. It feels great to have done something so risqué, ignoring all the worst case scenarios that tried to scare me out of the attempt and just doing it. I’m proud and I want to show off to Julie. I turn the kayak around to wait for her, but she doesn’t show. I wait some more, and she still doesn’t appear. I consider taking my adventure to the next level and kayaking out into the lake proper, but that seems a little too much. So I point the prow at the dam, and slide back into the river. Julie, it turns out, is just around the next bend.

“Where have you been?” she demands.

“I went over the dam both ways!” I announce.

“Well, I was looking for you the way you usually go, downstream.” I can tell she’s annoyed. “It’s totally choked with water lilies. You can’t go anywhere. So I turned around and came up here. Wait, you went over it both ways?”

“Yeah, the water’s really high, come on, try it.”

Julie paddles up to the dam and looks it over. She’s not sure she can make it. I can tell she really wants to do it because she has a competitive streak, but for a change she’s the one being cautious. So I demonstrate, making sure I get even more momentum going over so I’m not as stuck as the first time. Now Julie has to do it, and she does. With more panache, of course.

Then we kayak around the lake. We see a bunch of fisher folk: loons, an osprey, a bald eagle, a kingfisher, and an old guy and his granddaughter fishing off a pontoon boat. We get about halfway down one side of the lake and then cross it to come back. The water on this side of the lake is much choppier and waves are actually splashing into the kayak. It’s exciting, but a small choppy lake is nothing compared to kayaking the San Juan Straits in 14 knots of wind and I have no worries. (1) But I am pretty worn out afterwards and go to bed early.

The next day we plan on going to Minnesota’s “North Shore,” which is the north shore of Lake Superior (I’m only telling you that because I had no idea what it meant when I first moved here). It’s one of Julie’s favorite places. I’ve brought my bicycle and really want to ride some trails up there. I find info on the Gitchi Gami trail (not to be confused with the Gitche Gumee trail), a paved, non-motorized trail that sounds perfect except that it isn’t done yet. Ultimately, it will be over 80 miles long, but right now it’s several disconnected segments of just a few miles each. I want to ride the longest segment, nine miles or so between Split Rock River and Beaver Bay, but Julie wants to show me the Temperance River. The trail segment there is only three miles long, which is like nothing, but Julie assures me that the river is amazing, so I cave. The things we do for love and all that.

It takes about three hours to get to the trailhead, and I think that driving six hours in one day does not sound like a lot of fun. “Maybe we could find someplace to stay up there….” I suggest. Julie thinks about it for a quarter of a second and agrees. It's summer and there might not be anything available, but we pack our toothbrushes, just in case.

On the way, there’s a point where you can take the expressway from Duluth to Two Harbors, or you can take the scenic route. Julie pulls onto the scenic route before I can protest. Aargh. It’s bad enough to have to drive three hours, but then to add another ten minutes to the ride? It seems unbearable. Then, a huge RV pulls in front of us and we go even slower. It doesn’t bother Julie, though. She’s thrilled to be on the North Shore. I’ve only been there once before, in the winter. (2) Looking at it now, in the summer, it strikes me that the trees are all pretty small, reminiscent of the taiga we saw in Manitoba. (3)

As we approach our destination, a wayside rest in Schroeder, we start paying attention to the various hotels along the way. They all have No Vacancy signs. That doesn't bode well for the overnight option.

We almost miss the rest stop, but after two wrong turns we successfully park. The Gitchi Gami trail website (4) had said the trail started here, but we see no evidence of it. In fact, between the rest stop and the direction of the trail is a raging river crashing down red brown boulders to Lake Superior. The only way across is the highway.

A gentleman at the Schroeder Historical Society tells us how to get to the trail, which is just a couple of “blocks” east of the river. I think his use of the term “blocks” is odd since Schroeder, as far as I can tell, consists of the Historical Society, a post office, and a sandwich shop, all lined up on one side of highway 61. Come to think of it, it seems too small to have a Historical Society. But we don’t argue the point, we just saddle up, cross the river on the sidewalk (I don’t know about you, but I don’t like biking on highways), and find the trail a little ways on.

We bike about a mile when we come to a footbridge over another raging river. I stop in amazement. The water is crushed between the walls of a gorge forced to run faster and faster down to Lake Superior, roaring in protest, slamming into rocks and spitting foam. The water is red, as if tinged with blood. Then it disappears, swirling, down a hole in the rocks. I’m mesmerized.

“That’s the Temperance River,” says Julie. I can see why she loves it so much.

There’s more biking to be done, and we start off again. There are some long hills on the trail, and I’m huffing and puffing happily. Love those endorphins! Then the trail crosses the highway and just disappears. There's a road, but no trail. No sign. Nothing. But right there in front of us is the Sugar Beach Resort, and they just happen to have a vacancy. Figuring we have nothing to lose, we go into the office. The resort consists of cabins, all owned by different people and managed by the “resort.” I'm expecting it to cost $150 or so. The available cabin is $66/night. Yes, $66/night on the North Shore. It’s a no brainer. We take it. (We later discover this is by far the cheapest one they have. The next cheapest are $99/night). The manager calls it the “Christmas Tree” and when we get there we can see why. It’s painted tomato red and pine green and is very small. But it is spotlessly clean, with wood paneling and a little kitchen. It’s perfect.

We ride back to the car and decide to get some lunch at the Schroeder Baking Company. I order a cheese sandwich for $5.50, and Julie gets a Caesar Salad Wrap for $5.95. My sandwich consists of a single thin slice of cheddar cheese, topped with lettuce, tomato, and way too much mustard, and dwarfed by the supposedly sourdough hoagie roll which has a mealy consistency. I throw away 90% of the sandwich. Julie’s wrap is nothing but lettuce and tomato slathered with Caesar dressing. “For that much money, they should have chicken in here!” she laments. At least the cookie is good, I think, but Julie says hers is only mediocre.

Still hungry, we drive to our new digs and drop off the bikes. Then we drive the two miles to Temperance State Park for some hiking.

This is nothing like Banning State Park (5), which was very quiet. There are tons of people here, and many of them are wearing bathing suits and carrying towels. This surprises me since the river looks dangerous. It is dangerous, having claimed the lives of seven people in the last fourteen years, three of whom were trying to rescue children under their care who’d been caught by the current and swept away. In fact, one guy died just last month while swimming. They didn’t find his body for eighteen hours. (Yuk. Don't even try to picture it).

Given this, imagine my surprise when we see teenaged boys jumping twenty, thirty feet from the cliffs into the pool formed by the river as it comes out of that hole I mentioned earlier. The pool itself is relatively quiet, but within a short distance, the current picks up again and the water throws itself over another cliff (last year a teen got caught in that current and her camp counselor dove in to rescue her, but the river claimed both of them). A couple of young men see the teens jumping and, well, they have to do it too! I thought I was brave for running my kayak over a six inch bump. Though this jumping thing isn’t really bravery. More like testosterone poisoning. Ten years ago a teen died doing the same thing.

So, how do I describe this river? The sheer volume of water. The noise. The terrible beauty of it. Well, I can’t. But I took some pictures. Those might help a little bit. Except for all the people, it reminded me of images I’ve seen of Alaska. Did I mention that there were a lot of people?

Julie and I walk for maybe three hours total. Some of that isn’t walking, it’s Julie waiting while I take shots of the water from different angles. The trail starts going uphill, until you can’t even see the river anymore except as a bright glint through the trees. At one point we take an unauthorized side trail down the steep hill back to the water. There are people down there. A lot of them. So we head back up and walk the main trail some more. We see another side trail down and take that. People are there, too, though not as many. Julie finds a path, clearly rarely used, along the water’s edge and we walk that for awhile. We see no one on this trail, though there is a family on some rocks across the river. Eventually the path becomes so faint we decide to turn around and head back. We don’t want another adventure like we had in Banning. This is far more remote and dangerous.

For dinner, we drive into Lutsen and eat at the Lutsen Resort Village. There is a wedding reception going on, and what I remember most about it is one teenager with extremely unfortunate hair. The front is short, and the back has been piled up to look like cat ears. It is flat in the back, as if her head were square. Her posture radiates defiant embarrassment. I don't have the guts to ask to take her picture. The food is okay, but not spectacular, but the Riesling is very nice.

The Christmas tree cabin is still warm, but a chill is creeping into the air. We brought toothbrushes, but not pajamas or a change of clothes. Between not wanting to further soil our underwear, which has to do a second day of duty, and not wanting to wear our filthy socks and sweaty tee shirts for one more moment, we have little choice but to sleep nude. When we wake in the morning the cabin is freezing cold. It has a heater, but I practically catch pneumonia turning it on.

While Julie sleeps on, I head to the Coho Café for coffee, about a mile down Highway 61. This café is associated with the Bluefin Bay resort. We’d looked at its restaurant the night before and it felt too snooty for my tastes. Unfortunately, even the café has an air of superiority about it and I decide to just get my coffee to go. It isn’t even very good. I drink it in Tofte Park, looking out over the vastness of Lake Superior.

Since it is Sunday and we have to drive all the way home to Minneapolis, we don’t spend any more time lollygagging about. We notice on the drive back how many birch trees are dead and dying. Their tops have snapped off so cleanly that it looks like someone's been at them with a saw. Some are bent over as if their wood has been replaced by rubber. It is a weird and ominous sight. (6) We stop at Gooseberry Falls, another pretty and popular park, even more popular than Temperance River, but we don't stay long because I’m anxious to get home. Not because the park isn’t beautiful, or fun, or exciting, but I’ve had enough adventure for one weekend and I’m ready to curl up in my own (warm) bed with the cats and a good book.

So, until the next adventure....

(1) See my TravelPod blog about our trip to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula.
(2) See http://michelelloyd.com/friends/travel/TripUpNorth/index.html
(3) See my TravelPod blog about our trip to Churchill, Manitoba to see the Polar Bears.
(4) The Gitchi Gami trail website: http://www.ggta.org
(5) See my TravelPod blog about being lost in Banning State Park
(6) Why the birches are dying: http://michigansaf.org/ForestInfo/Newspaper/146-0907.htm
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/5/1249851845/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/5/1249851845/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/5/1249851845/tpod.html Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:06:48 -0400 Lost in Banning State Park, Minnesota

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Banning State Park, Minnesota, United States

Getting lost in Banning State Park, Minnesota



Banning State Park is roughly 100 miles north of the Twin Cities, straight up I-35, and is very close to our cabin. We've never been there before, until yesterday.

Before beginning my story, I’d like to interject that the scenery in the park is beautiful, sometimes almost stunning, and is well worth a visit if you live in Minnesota or Wisconsin.

Visiting the park is Julie’s idea, as most of our adventures are. We check the website to make sure there is actually stuff to do (the disappointment of finding only three short loop trails at Hoh rainforest is still with us). Looks like there are plenty of hiking opportunities, some of them right along the Kettle river.

Valinda drives. Since she lives up at the cabin now, we figure she should be the one to get the State Park Annual Pass sticker for her car. It costs $25.

First we stop for a picnic lunch. There’s an RV in the parking lot, and it sounds like it is running a generator. There are no people at any of the picnic tables near the RV, so they must be inside the vehicle. Why even bother going to a park for lunch if you are going to sit inside your RV anyway? We saw this in Washington, too. People who were playing loud music and watching TV in their campers. Why did they bother leaving home?

Anyway, we examine the map and decide to take the Quarry Loop Trail to the High Bluffs Trail to Wolf Creek Falls. That’s only about four miles roundtrip, so we leave our bottles of water in the car and strike out.

The Quarry trail is wide and pretty well-maintained. On the map, it looks like it is right next to the Kettle river. In horizontal distance it is, but vertically, it’s thirty or forty feet above the water. We meander over to a large rock overhanging. There are rapids below us. The website said we could "watch daring canoeists and kayakers shoot the turbulent rapids at Blueberry Slide, Mother's Delight, Dragon's Tooth and Hell's Gate," but we saw no one on the water. So much for entertainment!

There’s a smaller trail that parallels the main one a little farther down the slope. I’m sure we aren’t supposed to use it, but I want to. Valinda and Julie take the main trail and I struggle on my little deer trail, clambering over roots and negotiating narrow passages between slabs of rock. Julie and Valinda are out of sight, not to mention being far above my head, and I find myself hurrying to catch up. Periodically I stop to look down at the roiling water below, and then wish I hadn’t. Eventually the trail merges with the main one, and I catch up to my friends.

The humidity is something like 93%, and I’m overheating. I’m wishing we’d brought the water with us, and we’ve barely walked half a mile!

We come across the ruins of a large stone building. This is called the Quarry Trail because the whole area used to be a giant sandstone quarry, and there are markers along the path where interesting relics from that time can be found. The problem is that Valinda left the “self-guided tour” brochure in the car, so all we know is that this is site 13, and, more importantly, that there is a path down to the water. I dip my hat into the water and it feels so cool when I put it on my head… aaaaah.

Until now, we’ve seen no other people on the trails. But our solitude is disturbed when a group of two adults and four sullen teenagers clambers down the path towards us. We’re standing looking at these hundred year old stone walls, when a lanky teen with long greasy hair comes over, kicks a rock, and grunts. We decide we don’t need to look at the ruins anymore. There’s a path right between the walls that continues on in the same direction as the Quarry trail only closer to the edge, and we decide to take it. Valinda and Julie discuss the names of the various plants we pass, and I try to identify the bird songs I hear. We’ve climbed high above the river again, and we stop at just about every overlook and try to figure out how we would shoot the rapids if we were in our kayaks.

We arrive at another stone relic. It’s a hole in the ground, with parallel vertical stone slabs the height of the hole arranged as if they were floor joists. We later learn this is where they used to cut the sandstone. There is an enormous eye-ring embedded in a slab of concrete, something like twelve to eighteen inches in diameter. We cannot fathom what it was for. We think that perhaps they used giant oxen, like Paul Bunyon’s Babe, to cart the sandstone out of the forest, and the rings were used to tether the beasts.

We stop at another overlook. My wet hat is no longer cooling me, and Valinda suggests we dive off the rock into the water to cool off. Julie says she first needs to take out a life insurance policy, with Julie as the beneficiary. Valinda doesn’t jump.

We can return to the Quarry trail at this point, but instead we take a side trail that heads steeply downward, toward the water. This one is much more difficult than the others we were on before. Lots of ups and downs, clambering over roots and rocks. We look at our map and decide we’re on the Hell’s Gate trail (not recommended for small children). According to the map, this trail will suddenly end, and a short distance away will pick up again as the “lower Hell’s Gate trail.” It’s much closer to the water than the Quarry trail.

We come up a hill and right in front of us is a hole in the rock big enough to swallow all three of us at once. Its sides are worn smooth, and when we look down it, we see it is at least ten feet deep and opens into the air twenty feet above the water. If we’d been texting while we walked, we could have fallen right in! I’d say this path is not only unsuitable for small children, but for teenagers as well (though to be fair, the one person we saw using a cell phone in the park was an adult).

The technical term for these holes is “pothole,” but they are often called kettles (hence the name of the Kettle river). They are often formed as glaciers retreat and the waters start eddying. Little rocks go around and around, and eventually eat holes into the bed of the waterway. Once upon a time, the spot we are standing now was the bottom of a lake or river. We see a couple more of these kettles as we go along, usually conveniently located in the center of the path.

A little further on, we pull ourselves up a narrow cleft and see a giant anvil of rock just off shore. It looks like someone used a cleaver to cut a hunk of rock away, as if it were a piece of cake, and then pulled it away from the mainland. Of course, Valinda and I have to go over there. Julie says she wants to keep on going. We’re all getting tired and thirsty and she’s thinking of how long it will take to get back. Looking at the map, we’ve probably passed the end of the Quarry Loop Trail. I look up the nearly vertical slope. ”The High Bluff Trail must be w-a-a-a-y up there,” I point. It looks a lot closer on the map.

Julie forges on while Valinda and I cross the river. There are enough rocks and fallen trees that Valinda and I can easily get to the anvil without getting our feet wet. There are mature trees growing on this huge slab of rock, along with lots of the ever-present pale-green lichen. I see the first scat of the day, small and black. We wonder if it is from a mink. We see more potholes and Valinda has a revelation: They were made by clams, just like the ones we saw at Beach 4 in Kalaloch, Washington. Except these were really, really big clams. They must have chained them to those giant eyelets we saw above, and let them drill into the sandstone. Having figured this out, we feel much better.

Valinda and I are admiring the view when Julie returns. She tells us she reached a point where the rocks went straight down and I think she’s saying she reached the end of the Hell’s Gate trail. Does that mean we should go back? No, Julie thinks we can get around it. I take one last look at the sky, which is clouding up. I remember another recent adventure where we were caught on the river in kayaks during a thunderstorm, and hope I won’t have anything so exciting to write about this time.

Julie leads the way up the path. She climbs up these rocks where it’s hard to say for sure whether there is a path or not, and I look down and see there’s a very clear trail along the river. “Are you sure this is the way you went?” I ask her. “Positive,” she says. So I follow her. She was a girl scout for many years, after all.

I thought the path we were on before was mildly rigorous. It’s nothing compared to where Julie is taking us. I spend a lot of time on my butt to get from rock to slippery rock. Even when they aren’t covered in moss and lichen, they’re as slick as snot. Valinda, who had expected a metaphorical walk in the park, had only worn thin scrubs, and they were getting pretty dirty. Her shoes also weren’t designed for much more than flat pavement as they had little in the way of tread on the soles. I keep looking wistfully down at the path by the water, as it gets farther and father away.

We reach the point that Julie had gotten to before, that I had thought was the end of the trail. It isn’t. But it isn’t going to be easy to navigate, either. Between us and the continuation of the path, there’s a slab of slimy rock at a 45 degree angle, and then a drop of six feet. Even Julie has trouble getting across it and she’s a mountain goat. I look longingly at the path below. If I follow Julie now, there’s no turning back. I don’t see how I could get across this again. Before I can decide to chicken out, Valinda starts sliding across the rock on her butt. I guess I’m in.

There is still an obvious path, but it is narrow and sometimes between a rock and, well, a long way down. Trees make good handholds in these situations, but some of them are jutting out over nothingness with only their roots counteracting gravity’s pull. They don’t need us pushing and pulling on them as we struggle up the hills. Valinda and I both apologize to and thank the trees for their assistance.

We step across crevasses, splits in the rock that go down to the water and have ferns growing in them. There are all sorts of interesting mosses and lichen. One is black and hangs like peeling skin from the rocks. A piece lying on the ground looks like a bat. There are rock overhangs so deep they are like caves, and ferns grow on the vertical surfaces.

I notice a roaring sound ahead. We look down and see what must be Hell’s Gate—a narrowing of the river between two towering stone walls. The water is frothing and wild as it runs through the channel. There’s no sign of a path below anymore, just rock going straight down. That explains why the Hell’s Gate path ends. I’m thinking that we’re high up enough that we’ll go above that obstacle and be able to work our way down again to the Lower Hell’s Gate trail. Or, barring that, we’ll connect up with the High Bluff Trail.

My mouth is getting dry. Why did we leave the water in the car? Valinda, referencing the desperate humidity, tells me to breathe through my mouth if I need some water. It is like breathing something solid, and you can feel the water collecting in the bottom of your lungs, like sludge.

Julie, as usual, is ahead of Valinda and I who have been stopping to admire the moss that grows in little rounded mounds that look like tennis balls, and the bright yellow mushrooms with white spots (“don’t eat those,” Valinda warns me). She comes back toward us with some bad news. “The trail ends up ahead. You can either go straight up or straight down.”

So, we’re halfway up a cliff on an unsanctioned path, with what looks like a rainstorm brewing on the horizon, all of us tired and thirsty, and the path back is tricky enough that we don’t really want to attempt it (not to mention that this would be an admission of defeat of some sort). Straight up or straight down? Well, straight down puts you in the rapids, so we pretty much have to go straight up. Luckily, it isn’t really straight up. More like a sixty degree angle, and there are lots of handholds. We figure that we’ll climb the rocks and at the top will be the High Bluff Trail which we’ll follow back to civilization.

Climbing the rocks isn’t really all that difficult and dangerous, except that they are kind of slippery, and if we did fall we’d be goners. Even so, I notice how my attention focuses very tightly on the act of climbing so that all I care about is the next handhold and how I will pull myself up to the next rock.

I reach the top first, and I really expect to see a trail, but I don’t. Just woods extending as far as I can see.

Shit.

Until now, I’d been only slightly concerned about our situation, but my adrenaline level jumps up a notch at this point because we really are committed now. Going up that hill is one thing, but going down it? I don’t think that would be such a good idea. Julie comes up next, and she says, “there’s a trail.” It looks like a deer trail to me, not a state-park-maintained-trail, but at least it goes in the right direction. “As long as we keep the river on the right we’ll be okay,” says Valinda.

It is even more humid up here, if such a thing is possible. I am wearing a T-shirt and a button-down Buzz-Off (insect repellent) shirt. The tee is so wet it is sticking to me, so I decide to take it off and just wear the looser button-down. I’m not someone who readily takes my shirt off outside of my house, but there is absolutely no one around to see. Even so, I feel a little bit naughty.

We start following the trail, with Julie in the lead. It is definitely like a deer trail—one minute the trail is perfectly obvious, and the next you’re looking around trying to figure out where it went.

So we’re walking through the forest. Valinda is sweating like mad, and I’m starting to stumble now and then. We’re really, really tired and hot and thirsty. Sometimes the trail disappears, but Julie always finds it again. The edge of the cliff is on our right. We can hear the water down below.

Then there’s a big chasm ahead of us. To our left there is a stone bluff about six feet high. To our right is a forty-foot drop. We backtrack to where the bluff on the left is shorter. We find another deer trail and keep on going. We keep the river on the right, but we’re farther from it than we were. Valinda and I stumble more often. We run into another chasm, and do the same thing, head away from the river until we can get over it. Then there’s another one. We can’t hear the river any more, and if we look down the cliff, we can’t see it, either. More than anything, this worries me. Plus, I think it’s getting dark. “No,” I tell myself, “that’s just because you’re wearing sunglasses in a forest.” But then Valinda calls out, “Hey, it’s a chipmunk,” and at that exact moment a barred owl starts calling from across the river. Owl = night in my mind. I start wondering just how late it actually is. And where we are, and how far we’re going to walk before we come across some sign of civilization, and will that be anywhere near where we left the car?

We trudge onward. Julie is out of sight ahead of me, and I hear a sound like someone falling. When I get to her, I notice two things. First, the path is sloping downward. This is a good thing in my opinion, since the place where we parked the car is significantly lower than the bluff we are on right now.

Second, it occurs to me that it is unusual for Julie to be sitting. “I’m just catching my breath,” she says.

“Did you fall? I thought I heard something.”

“Yeah, be careful, the rocks are slippery.” She stands with a groan. “Good thing I have strong bones.” No kidding! It’s bad enough to be injured when you are hiking and miles from help, but it’s a lot worse when you are hiking and lost and miles from help.

I’m being careful coming down the rocks and I start to slip, too, but I manage to grab a tree and keep from falling. Valinda just walks around the rocks.

The fact that we are heading downward has me in better spirits, but the owl keeps calling so I can’t help but imagine what we’d do if it got dark while we were up here. Probably just stop and get eaten by mosquitoes all night. I wonder if the rangers would come looking for us when they saw Valinda’s car still in the lot, and how on earth they’d even know where to look.

Just then, Julie yells back, “You’re really going to like what I just found.”

It is a real trail. As wide as a car, flat, clearly demarcated. We’re home free!

When we get back to the car, the first thing we do is gulp down all our water. On the drive home, we stop to watch a family of Sandhill cranes in a field, two adults and a youngster. There are deer, too. Half an hour after we get back, it starts pouring rain, and lightning shoots out of the sky into the trees by the river.

I was really glad not to be lost on the side of a bluff in Banning State Park.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248833474/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248833474/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248833474/tpod.html Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:11:19 -0400 Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

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Seattle, Washington, United States

6:45 am: Need coffee. After a shower, I headed to the Internet Café, and … it wasn't open! So I drank the nasty canned Starbucks concoction that I’d been carrying since Seattle in case of emergencies like this one.

Maybe that’s why I was cranky all day.

This was our last day in Washington. We had to return the rental car by 5 pm and our flight left at 7:20. The plan was to kind of meander across the peninsula back to the airport. We had nothing solid planned. Some people like operating that way; they feel it gives them freedom and spontaneity. I’m not so into it myself.

At eight, when Julie and Valinda were awake and showered, I opened my laptop (the Quinault River Inn has wi-fi), pulled up Google Maps, and showed Julie and Valinda that it would take 4 hours to get to the airport. That gave us nine hours to kill. "Where do you want to go?" I asked.

“I don’t know. Where is there to go?” they asked. Like I knew!

“You’re the one who wanted to leave an unplanned day!” I snapped at Julie. “I planned this whole trip out, so you guys can figure out what we’re going to do for one day of it!” (Told you I was cranky).

Well, I still ended up designing our plan since I was the one who was better at getting around on the internet. The thing is, it’s really hard to find out anything about this part of Washington. Safe in Minneapolis, I hadn’t realized why. Now I knew—there’s hardly anything here! You see a town on the map and you assume it’s an actual town, but when you arrive, you discover there’s nothing there, like at Kalaloch.

One website said that the Oyhut Wildlife Recreation Area, located in Ocean Shores at the very tip of the peninsula that forms Gray’s Harbor, had lots of wildlife. Valinda and I thought that sounded great. Julie wanted to drive along the ocean. So we made a plan to take 101 south to a town called Humptulips, turn west onto Copalis Crossing Road to Copalis Beach. From there, we’d drive south along the ocean to Ocean Shores, then we’d just scurry from there to Seattle (still four hours away).

I was driving. When I’m driving in a strange place, I’m not very good at being spontaneous. I reviewed the map to get a sense of what we were doing, but I was relying on my navigator, Julie, to keep me on track. This was an especially important role given the signage in Washington. I’ve mentioned that it sucks. Well, it proved itself to be even worse than previously experienced.

First, we hit the town of Humptulips, which is a blinker (you blink and you miss it). We’d seen a sign for Kirkpatrick road, but nothing for Copalis Crossing Road. We’d driven a mile or two past the “town” and I was demanding that Julie tell me if we’d missed the turn. The map was for the entire peninsula, so it’s not like it showed a lot of detail and she couldn’t tell where we were until we passed a road that was on the map. Finally we did, and sure enough, we’d missed our turn. I turned around, and shortly thereafter saw a sign telling us “Ocean beaches: Left, 1 mile.” That road turned out to be Kirkpatrick.

It was annoying that the map didn’t show the right street name, but what really bugged me is that they had a sign for the beaches when you were driving north, but no sign when you were driving south. WTF is that about?

Okay, fine. We drove along through forests, and clear-cut land, and we went through this utterly depressed little town called Copalis Crossing. However, it had two bright spots. First, we passed this really run-down building that called itself a hotel, which had a big sign, hand painted in scrawling black letters, reading, “Cockroach Christian Church,” with an arrow pointing to the left. I admit I was curious about this. Was the owner of the motel pissed off at a local church and was denigrating it? Was it the real name of the church? Was it full of cockroaches? Did the congregation consist of cockroaches? Was 'cockroach’ being used in a literal or metaphorical fashion?

Since spontaneity is not my thing, I didn’t stop to find out.

The second interesting sight was a life-sized plywood caricature of Bigfoot with a surfboard outside a different hotel.

Eventually we reached Copalis Beach. Not that we could see the ocean from the road or anything. The town was as depressed and depressing as its neighbors. Obviously, being a beach town, it was a tourist draw, but for tourists who did not have very much money.

We kept driving.

The map was a little deceptive. You know how maps are. Either things look really close, but they are far apart, or they look far apart when they are actually close. We thought it would take some time to reach the next town, Ocean City, but we were there before we knew it. There was an Ocean City in Maryland, where I grew up, so I decided to drive down to the public beach. You could do that. Literally. People were parked all the way down at the water’s edge. I didn’t dare go that far and turned back before I could get the car stuck in the sand.

A little farther on, we hit the center of town and I got really excited. They had two gas stations! I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a town with two gas stations. Ocean City was a thriving metropolis.

We passed another Bigfoot sign. One sign is cute. Two signs means something is up. Once at home, I googled “Bigfoot Copalis” and got some hits. Apparently the whole area has a lot of Bigfoot sightings. I found this particular story to be very well-told and frightening: http://www.bigfootencounters.com/stories/cowman.htm.

Anyhow, I kept driving and went up a mountain and down a mountain and Julie asked if we were on highway 115 yet, and I said I didn’t think so and we generally wondered when we would see the turnoff for Ocean Shores. That’s about the time we hit the edge of Hoquiam, which is like fifteen miles past the turnoff.

WTF? How did that happen?

Since when I’m driving in a strange area, I have a tendency to just keep on going unless given other instructions, I asked, “What should we do now? Go back?”

“We could….”

“Maybe….”

With answers like those, we were going to be in Seattle in no time.

I saw a sign up ahead for a Wildlife Viewing Area. It required sudden braking and an ungraceful right turn, but I made it. I followed the sign that said, “Wildlife Viewing 1 mile” and then I ended up at a municipal airport. WTF? Where was the wildlife viewing?

“Oh, there were signs that said it was on the right.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t see a way in.”

Disgusted, I turned the car around. The woods on that side were fenced in, and there was indeed a sign saying it was a wildlife preserve of some kind and it also said, “Keep Out!”

Why did they even bother putting a sign on the highway?

We stopped to consider our next move. I wanted to go back to Ocean Shores, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think Julie wanted to go, and I didn’t know what Valinda wanted. Finally, with no firm answer forthcoming from the passengers, I just pulled out and said, “Okay, I guess we’ll keep on going then.” That’s when Valinda piped up that she wanted to see Ocean Shores, which made two of us against Julie (though she never actually said what she wanted to do).

We went back up the mountain and then down the mountain. Julie was on the lookout for a sign pointing to 115 to Ocean Shores. I guessed that it was back where I was distracted by the two gas stations, and indeed it was. Now that we were traveling north, we got a sign that said, “Ocean Shores, Left 1 mile.” That sign did not exist for the other direction, thank you very much, Washington State sign makers. The turn turned out to be the same one as for Ocean City State Park, which we had seen a sign for on the way down, but since we didn’t want to go to Ocean City State Park, we’d ignored it.

Ocean Shores seemed to be doing pretty well, economically. As the drive down the peninsula went on and on, at 35 miles an hour through ocean-side tourist hell, I worried we’d made a bad choice. We’d already wasted an hour driving to Hoquiam and back. At this rate we’d just have time to wave at the birds before heading off to the airport.

I consoled myself that this time I was finally going to see some native Washington wildlife that I could not see at home.

Finally we reached the end of the peninsula, but there were no signs anywhere for the wildlife recreation area. Julie insisted that, according to the map, the park was to our left. All we could see to our left was a tall dune with plants growing on it. We drove along, looking for an entrance to the park. At one point we found a public beach access point, but the dozens of screaming children running around made us think that couldn’t possibly lead to the wildlife area.

We drove all around, and never saw any sign that this so-called Oyhut Wildlife Recreation Area existed. We did see lots of sub-developments, and lots of houses for sale, and lots of places to rent bicycles or scooters (and a place that rented horses—that actually sounded like fun).

OK fine. So no wildlife viewing here either. We drove back up the peninsula, up the mountain and down the mountain and into Hoquiam. It was getting to be lunchtime. When I’m driving in a strange place, I don’t like to stop. You have to make me stop. I will drive straight through to my destination, even if it means getting there five hours early.

“What do you guys want for lunch? If you see something you want, just say so. You need to tell me to stop or I won’t.”

Nothing. Were they not sure of what they wanted? Were they afraid to say? Sometimes I’m afraid to say what I want in these situations because the very act of asking for it usually means I get it and then I feel guilty because maybe the other people didn’t really want to do it they just did it because I said something.

I didn’t know what motivated Julie and Valinda, but between my reluctance to be the one to decide, and my predilection to just keep on going, I needed their input if we were going to get any food.

“There’s a Subway, Julie. Do you want to do Subway?”

“We could do that.”

I drove past it. “Why didn’t you stop?” she asked, swiveling her head to watch it recede into the distance, obviously annoyed.

“You didn’t say you wanted to. Anyway, I don’t want to eat there. When I’m traveling, I’d rather eat somewhere I couldn’t eat at home.” (Providing I ever stop to eat, that is).

Soon Hoquiam merged into Aberdeen. No decisions were made. Then there was a long stretch of nothing but trees on one side, and port industries on the other. We passed a “scenic viewpoint” that looked out over the giant port cranes. My stomach was growling. Up ahead was a town called Montesano and Lake Sylvia State Park. “Let’s get off here, find somewhere to get food, and take it to the park to eat,” I suggested. Julie and Valinda agreed.

We drove up the main street, and aside from a Subway, didn’t see anything promising. I did a circle, and as we were approaching the main street again, I saw Pizza Express on the right. “Pizza sounds good, if we could stand to wait for it,” I said.

“The sign says they have sandwiches and burritos,” Julie announced as we passed. I swung into the first parking place I saw.

At the counter, we asked how long a pizza took to make. “Fifteen to twenty minutes,” the guy said. So we all ordered burritos to save time. A call came in just then ordering a pizza. That pizza was done before they had finished making our three burritos. WTF?

We drove out to the park and ate our lunch and took a little walk that was carefully timed. That was at Valinda’s suggestion. I was not the only one concerned about meeting schedules, unlike for our ferry ride to Friday Harbor many days earlier. Missing our plane was simply not acceptable.

I admit I was probably a lot more anal about it than either of the others, though.

We saw a Steller’s Jay, something we do not have in Minnesota, and a dead shrew, which we do.

About an hour later, we reached Olympia, the capital. We’d been told during our Underground Seattle tour that the reason Olympia was the capital and not Seattle was that Olympia had better oysters.

Shortly after Olympia, we reached Interstate 5. I thought this meant we’d be traveling much more quickly, and given that it was only two pm, I thought we should try to cram in one more small adventure rather than spend the time sitting at the airport. I brought the idea up.

Julie, who had the map, asked, “What should we do?”

“How the hell should I know? You’ve go the map. Maybe we could take a quick trip up to the Sound or something.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Oh come on, there’s got to be something. What about in Tacoma?”

Julie thrust the map at Valinda. “Here, you see if you can find something to do.”

Just then, traffic slowed to a crawl. “Well, maybe we shouldn’t do anything after all.”

This was one of those inexplicable traffic jams. When it finally eased up maybe half an hour (and two miles) later, there was no apparent reason for the delay. No accident or road construction. Maybe there’d been a Bigfoot sighting. Who knew? Regardless, we were happy to be moving again. We still had some time to kill, and Valinda suggested that we drive out to Deception Point in Tacoma. She would navigate. But shortly before the exit, traffic came to a standstill again.

My worry-machine kicked into gear. Obviously, traffic was a big unknown around here. At the rate we were going, we wouldn’t reach the airport until five. I wasn’t so sure taking a detour was a good idea. But on the other hand, if traffic sped up again, I knew I did not want to sit in the airport for an extra couple of hours.

So, we took the exit for Deception Point. It was a long drive through the streets of Tacoma. The area we were in had no distinguishing characteristics, and looked similar to the area of Seattle Valinda and I had driven through on the day we got lost and ended up crossing the bridge over Lake Washington. Maybe that should have tipped me off that things weren’t going to go as we expected.

On the map, Point Deception Park was a large splotch of green. We expected to be met with a park that we could drive through. Instead, well, who the heck knows what happened. We could take one turn to exit the park and go to the zoo, or another to go to the marina. We knew we did not want the zoo or the exit, so we went to the marina, which just looped around and took us right back to where we’d chosen between the marina and the zoo.

“WTF? Where’s the park?” exclaimed Valinda, who was pretty pissed off that we couldn’t find what looked like a large city park on the map. “I guess there’s a reason it’s called Deception Point.”

If I had not been driving, I would have used my iPhone to look at Google Maps. I did hand it to Julie, but a crisis is not the best time to learn new technology, so it basically kept her lap warm. Valinda consulted the paper map again.

“Well, why don’t we take Gallagher Way around the bay and back to I-5? It looks like it goes right along the shore. It should be pretty.”

The problem was, we’d just been where Gallagher Way was, and that road (the name of which we did not see) was one-way the wrong way. I pulled over to look at the map myself. Bear in mind the map was not a map of Tacoma, but a regional map and had very little detail at this level. It showed maybe every 10th city block. Most of the cross streets didn’t look like they made it all the way to Gallagher anyhow, so I decided to drive up to a street that clearly did. Valinda thought we should just turn at the first available street and take our chances, but if there’s one thing I hate more than driving in a strange place when I have an approaching time deadline that I’m worried about meeting, it is getting lost while driving in a strange place when I have an approaching deadline that I’m worried about meeting. While we weren’t lost right at that moment, we had been sort of lost when we hit the marina and didn’t know what was going on, and the adreneline spike was still with me.

So, we drove fifteen blocks to 30th St, and when we approached what was supposed to be Gallagher Way, we ended up on another road altogether. Heck, maybe Gallagher turned into this road, but we could not see the water through the train that was parked between us and it, and even though she didn’t say anything, I could tell Valinda was miffed that I hadn’t followed her advice and turned sooner.

At this point, we were whizzing along with no clue where we were. Luckily, we actually were right where we were supposed to be because we saw a sign for I-705 which would take us back to I-5.

Traffic was still kind of slow on the freeway, so I decided we were not going to have any more adventures. As we crept along, I wondered just how far the airport actually was. There were no road signs saying something helpful like, “SeaTac Airport, 35 miles.” Not surprising, of course, but it did make it difficult to know when I should pull off for gas. I didn’t want to end up in a situation like I had in Arizona, where we could not find a gas station anywhere on our route back to the airport and had ended up paying the outrageous rate they charged to fill it themselves.

Here’s how I decided: when I had to pee badly enough, I took the next exit and stopped for gas. A win-win situation.

I asked the clerk how far it was to the airport and she said, “Oh, about 45 minutes, depending on traffic. It’s a ways off. You have to go through…” and she listed all these towns I’d never heard of. It was 3:45, so we’d get the car back earlier than we’d planned, but not by too much.

Maybe the clerk didn’t travel much. It took fifteen minutes to get to the airport. On the good side, getting the back an hour earlier saved us about $30.

The next obstacle to getting home was Security. If you’ve flown since 9/11/01, you know there are all kinds of rules about what you can take on the airplane. Valinda had pulled out her baggies of liquids, lotions and gels in preparation for Security. “Uh, Valinda, you can only have one bag,” I told her.

“No, really? I didn’t see that anywhere.”

“I’m pretty sure you can only have one bag, quart sized or smaller, and all your items in it have to be three ounces or less.” Before she started freaking out about what she’d have to throw away, I volunteered to take a bag through for her. I don’t do baggies anymore. I just buy stuff at my destination and leave behind what I can’t use in the last room I stay in. It’s just easier that way.

Especially this time. Not only did I have my two carry on bags, I also had a laptop, which had to be put into its own tray to go through the X-ray machine. Then there was the tray for my shoes. They used to want you to run your baggie through in its own tray as well, so that’s what I did. I was up to five items to keep track of. I got ready to walk through the metal detector, and a TSA guy leaned over and told me I should take off my outer shirt, which was a button-down shirt I was wearing open and un-tucked in. So that got its own bin. I walked through the detector and there were no beeps, but the guard told me I’d have to wait until someone could come and pat me down. I looked at what I was wearing. I had on another loose shirt (whatever I can’t fit into luggage, I wear onto the plane). “How about I take this shirt off?”

The guard almost smiled. “Thank you,” he said, “that would be a lot easier.”

So I ended up with seven separate items going through the X-ray machine. Getting them onto the conveyer was bad, but getting them off again while trying not to hold up the line was even worse. There’s a reason I hate flying.

Valinda and I sat near each other to get our stuff back where it belonged. This took me awhile, but even after I was done, there was no sign of Julie. It turned out the guy in front of her did not speak English and had not reviewed the FAA’s website about liquids, lotions, and gels, so he was trying to carry on all sorts of contraband. The TSA guard kept trying to explain to him about the rules, which he couldn’t understand, and was telling him he’d have to check his bags if he wanted to bring his toiletries with him. Eventually they got the guy out of the way so everyone behind him could get through. It’s bad enough dealing with some of these rules (like, you can bring a four-inch scissors on board, with a sharp point, but you cannot carry on a Swiss Army knife with a one-inch blade. WTF?), but to try to understand them when you don’t even know the language? Yikes.

That was the last problem of the day. For a moment there we were seriously concerned about the two babies who were seated in the row in front of us, but the flight attendant moved them to the back row as soon as the plane was in the air and we never heard a scream out of them.

On landing, we discovered the pilot was a woman, and I told her that made me happy.

On getting home, we discovered Bob had peed all over the bed. Two things about this:

1. Bob is a cat, not a man.

2. I know I said there were no more problems that day, but it was a red-eye and technically we found the pee the following day.

So, unfortunately we couldn’t immediately fall into bed, but since we know about Bob’s propensity to act out in this fashion, we’d taken precautionary measures. The damage was minimal and didn’t take all that long to remediate.

I was sad to be done with vacation, but it was nice to curl up in my own bed, surrounded by my own kitties. Tucker and Tik-Tik and June and Muffin were all great animals, but nothing beats getting your face licked by your own best furry friend.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248552953/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248552953/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248552953/tpod.html Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:15:18 -0400 Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

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Amanda Park, Washington, United States

I got up at the usual time and trudged up to the Internet Café for my mocha. Even a town as miniscule as Amanda Park has fru-fru coffee. When Julie and Valinda finally deigned to get up, we all went back to the Internet Café for breakfast.

The owner, Roz, was happy to tell us her story. She and her husband bought the building the café is in for some dirt cheap price so it is totally paid off. They live in the back, rent office space to the Post Office, run the Internet Café and restaurant and the Visitors Center (for which they only get about $3600/year, but that's better than nothing, plus it brings in customers) and they still find it tough going. She relies on the tourists for most of her revenue. During the tourist season, June and July, she takes in fifteen times what she earns for the rest of the year combined.

That gives you an indication of how bleak the economic situation is there, and as far as we could tell, it’s the same all along the west coast of Washington.

Amanda Park’s most interesting feature is perhaps the Mercantile. This is a General Store and it has everything. Home repair supplies, clothing, groceries, books, DVD rental, snacks, and on and on. There’s not a single level spot anywhere in the place. I was constantly feeling like I was about to tip over!

The day’s agenda was to visit the Quinault Rain Forest. The Quinault rocks. Don’t even bother going to Hoh. You can see everything Hoh had at Quinault, plus they have many more hiking trails. We walked pretty much all day, covering a total of seven and a half miles. And that was on a fraction of the trails. Even better—they weren’t crowded.

I’m not even going to try to describe the forest in words. It’s wonderful and you should go see it for yourself.

At one point on the walk, we had a near miss with a bear. As we started up one trail, a woman warned us about a small black bear further up. I immediately took the lens cap off the camera and took point because I wanted to be the first one to see the bear. Otherwise Julie would see it first (she walks much faster than Valinda or I do) and scare it off. Up we went, with me carefully checking around every bend for a bear. We never saw it, though. But I figure it was really close by, so I’m counting it!

We had dinner at a restaurant called the Salmon House. The food was excellent, and we actually got it quite quickly. Probably because we were the first ones there.

After dinner, we drove about ten miles down the river to hike the trail to Irely Lake. It was marked as a 1.1 mile trail of moderate difficulty.

They have a funny idea of what constitutes "moderate." I’d hate to go on one of the difficult trails. This had lots of ups and downs, and sometimes the path consisted of tree roots with foot-sized gaps between them. It was stunningly gorgeous, and absolutely empty of other humans.

We’d arrived around six pm, which meant there should have been about three more hours of light. But the forest was so dark already that I felt like I was wearing sunglasses. After realizing this wasn’t going to be a quick one mile jaunt, I started worrying a little bit about what would happen if the sun set while we were in there. With no light source, we’d have to just sit on our butts and wait for morning because you’d just kill yourself stumbling around in there in the pitch blackness of night. Julie and I decided we should walk fast on the way in, and meander on the way back when we had a sense of how much light really was left to us. Valinda is a die-hard meanderer, though, and the pace was kind of hard on her. That isn’t to say I was doing so great either. Julie was always way ahead of me, sometimes out of sight, and I was always way ahead of Valinda. Julie and I would each periodically stop and wait until we could see the person behind us. I didn’t usually mind those stops since I was panting from exertion and sweating like mad from the workout plus the humidity.

At one point we came across an area filled with tiny toads, each hardly bigger than my thumbnail. They were everywhere on the paths, and it was difficult not to step on them because they looked just like the tiny pine cones littering the trail, until they moved. In some spots there were so many of them the ground just seethed with their tiny black and brown bodies scurrying to get away from us. Julie came back for me around then. She was afraid I would refuse to walk any further lest I kill a toad. I did my very best not to squish any, but there were so many of them, I’m sure I killed a few. It made me mad at them, for putting me in that position.

Finally, we came to a steep hill going down and Valinda said she was going to wait at the top. Julie and I negotiated the path, sometimes having to sit on a root to get down to the next “step” of the path. It turned out the lake was right there. But we didn’t go all the way down because there didn’t appear to be any shoreline, just marsh.

We’d come to this lake because I’d read a brochure that said there were lots of waterfowl and amphibians there. We’d seen the amphibians, but the lake looked devoid of any animal life. There were huge, white cedar tree skeletons poking up from the water’s depths, giving it an eerie feel. I wondered if any trees had fallen across the path behind us.

There was still plenty of light on the way back. In fact, it seemed like there was more than when we went in. This was our time to meander, and we did, but not in a casual way, oohing and ahing over the sights. We were all so exhausted, we just wanted to get back to our room and go to sleep. By the last quarter mile, Valinda and I were practically stumbling back to the car. Julie, as usual, seemed indefatigable.

That walk was my favorite part of the entire trip.
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Amanda Park, Washington, United States

The next stage of our journey was to travel down the peninsula to the Quinault rainforest. Technically, it's all one big rainforest, but there are different "entrances."

We got a late start and headed out of Forks on state highway 101 around ten. According to the map, we’d be inland for about 25 miles, curving toward the ocean, then be along the shore for about 10 miles, and then head inland again. We’d go through a couple of towns, Kalaloch (pronounced Klaylock) and Queets, before reaching our final destination of Amanda Park. Julie was driving, Valinda was navigating, and I sat in the back seat with my own map as a co-navigator. My map and Valinda’s map did not always agree, so we’d get into little arguments about who was right. Finally, she handed me her map, and I became the official back seat navigator.

Valinda’s map showed a point of interest called “Big Cedar Tree” right along the ocean just a few miles north of Kalaloch. When we saw the sign for the Big Cedar Tree, it seemed way too soon. We hadn’t seen any sign of the ocean yet. But we decided to check it out and found ourselves on a gravel logging road. I didn’t expect it to be far since it was only a millimeter or two from the highway according to the map. It would be a quick little diversion for us. But as we drove and drove, I started to wonder what the heck we’d gotten ourselves into. Julie saw a sign that the tree was three miles ahead. When you’re traveling at just 20 miles an hour, three miles takes awhile, but it was too late to turn back.

The land around us was a mixture of logged out areas, new growth, and older growth. One thing we saw a lot of on the peninsula was the devastation wrought by clear-cutting. You’ve got to wonder what the hell is wrong with people. They’d just cut down every single tree for acre upon acre, and whatever they couldn’t use they’d either just leave lying there to rot or heap into enormous brush piles. Sometimes whole hillsides were devastated. It broke my heart to think of the trees murdered for no reason except laziness and greed, not to mention all the animals who were killed during the process, or who lost their homes. I know there are arguments for why clear-cutting is actually better than some of the alternatives, but it’s pretty hard to stomach the idea. If you believe that trees and animals are just things to be used, sure, cutting all the trees down isn’t a big deal to you. But to me, it’s equivalent to going into a village of people where there’s been an outbreak of disease and killing every single person, regardless of whether they are sick, just to make sure the disease doesn’t spread. It’s not meant to be an exact analogy, but the concept is the same: it’s cheaper and easier to kill everyone than to find a method that maximizes life while still attaining your goals.

Eventually we rounded a curve and were faced with a dilemma. The road came to a tee, and there was no signage telling us which direction to take (surprise, surprise). We evaluated the two options. The left branch was pretty level and seemed in decent shape. To the right, the road not only went up a steep incline, but was rutted and generally in bad shape. Our logic was that the road to the left, the one that looked more cared for, was the one to the Big Cedar Tree. So we went left. Shortly thereafter, the road became worse, and worse, and eventually it was clear that no one had driven this way in quite some time, and we’d taken the wrong turn.

The Big Cedar Tree turned out to be just around the curve from the unmarked turn. What we saw as we approached was a big, white stick poking into the sky. This tree looked utterly dead, kaput, a tree no more. It had no bark, and had been bleached by the elements until it looked like the driftwood we’d seen along the Dungeness Spit. Way, way up, there was some growth, but we couldn’t tell if it was the cedar, or some other tree that was using this one as a vertical nurse log. According to the sign, it was the largest western red cedar in the world, 178 feet high, and 19.4 feet in diameter.

We walked around it for a couple of minutes and left. Been there, done that, let’s get out of here.

There was still the mystery of why we’d have to travel so far to get to this tree, when the map showed it being right on the ocean. We soon discovered the reason when we finally reached the shore and passed another sign for a Big Cedar Tree: Either there’s more than one Big Cedar Tree, or there’s a way to get to the one we saw that didn’t involve miles of travel on dirt roads. We did not try to find out.

The beaches along this stretch of ocean have very imaginative names: Beach 4, Beach 3, Beach 2, Beach 1, and South Beach. We stopped at Beach 4. The parking area was high above the water, and we could see hardly anything from the lookout because the entire beach was fogged in. This is one of the ways that the Olympic Peninsula confounded my expectations: I had imagined warm, sunny beaches. We never saw one. Just a lot of fog.

Still, we went down to see and were pleasantly surprised because there were tide pools, where we saw lots of disgustingly interesting sea creatures, like anemones, and some things like anemones that glistened with slime, and some weird shrimp-like bugs, and a growth that looked like white brains.

As it was getting to be lunchtime, we skipped Beach 3 and headed straight for Kalaloch, located between beaches 2 and 3.

I was expecting a town, but once again, I was confounded. Kalaloch consists of a lodge and a general store whose selection of pre-made luncheon items was not exactly appetizing. We ended up buying bagged popcorn and cheese sticks and drove down to Beach 2 to enjoy it.

Beach 2 was a little different from Beach 4. To get to the sand, you had to cross a barrier composed of dozens of dead trees thrown about by the ocean. In fact, one of the prominent warnings at all the beaches we visited was that the logs were dangerous, and that if the tide came in while you were on the beach, it could turn one of them into a weapon. People have been killed. Another feature of the beaches is that they have these round, black and red signs posted on trees near beach-access paths. This is to help you escape the water and projectile logs if you are stupid enough to be caught on the beach when the tide is coming in (they also post the tide tables and tell you to be familiar with them).

The tide was very low when we got there, and it was even foggier than Beach 4 had been. No one was around except for a woman building little stone cairns near the spot where you first come in. We didn’t have to walk far to find a bone white log large enough for the three of us to sit in comfort and eat our meal.

Afterwards took a little stroll down to the water, which was quite far out, and when we came back, the fog was so thick that we couldn’t find the path to the parking lot. In the fog, everything looked the same: white and ghostly. The black and red marker wasn’t visible. Finally we stumbled upon the cairns the woman had been building at the entrance. Thank you stranger!

Back on the cliff, we took a detour down the Spruce Burl path. Burls are these growths that trees get when there is some kind of damage or irritation to the tree. Those along the path were particularly deformed by them. See pics.

As we left the beach, Julie said we only had a bit more than a quarter tank of gas left. I did some mental calculations and figured we could go at least seventy five miles on the gas we had left. The town of Queets was just five miles away, and it had a gas station, but the pumps all had signs saying “No Gas.” There were no other towns until Amanda Park, some twenty five miles further on. We agreed we should be fine, which was why we decided to go ahead and take a detour up Queets Valley Road (called Queets River Road on the other map). One map showed a cut in the road, as if it stopped and then picked up again later. The other showed it going all the way up to Queets Campground.

Almost as soon as we turned onto the road, there was a sign telling us it was closed in seven miles. But it was beautiful scenery, and we figured we’d just drive along for awhile. It would only be a fourteen mile detour, leaving plenty of gas to get to Amanda Park. Even so, I worried. We were pretty close to the middle of nowhere, and you don’t want to run out of gas there.

It didn’t help my nerves when Julie suddenly announced, “I think this is one of those situations where you run out of gas faster toward the end of the tank. We’re below a quarter tank now.”

Yikes. “Should we turn around?” I asked. But Julie thought we’d be fine.

So, we were driving up this gravel road. I kept saying, “Hey, let’s stop at this turnout and walk to the river,” and Julie kept on driving past. Finally she did stop, and I got out, but neither Julie nor Valinda wanted to come with me because they were not wearing the “appropriate footwear,” which explained Julie’s reluctance to stop in the first place

I hiked down this very narrow trail until I reached the river. It was a beautiful combination of blue-grey and aquamarine. I stood there for a few moments enjoying the beauty, and when I turned around, I could not see the trail I’d just come in on. I walked down what looked like it was the trail, but it wasn’t, and I went back to my spot by the river. Where was the trail? I imagined having to bushwhack back to the car, getting lost along the way perhaps, and running into one of those charging elk. I tried another likely route, but it again did not lead to the trail. How could I lose the trail? I’d just come down it. Boy did I feel stupid, especially since it was the second time in one day that I’d gotten lost. Finally, I spotted a bare patch of dirt under a giant stand of sword ferns. I clambered over several dead logs, and was very relieved to discover I had found the path. I hurried back to the car and got into the car again. I didn’t suggest any more stops along the way.

As previously mentioned, you can’t go very fast on gravel roads, at least not in rented Hyundai Sonatas, so it took us a long time to reach the end of the road. The scenery looked every inch what you’d expect to see in a temperate rainforest, with huge conifers covered in moss, and ferns carpeting the forest floor. Same old same old for this part of Washington.

At last we reached the end of the road. A swing gate blocked access, and a sign announced the road had been closed because of a severe landslide. Julie was getting ready to just turn around and go back (that footwear thing again), but both Valinda and I piped up that we’d like to stop and maybe take a walk up that road to see the landslide.

The road continued past the barricade, seemingly normal except for the large trees that had fallen across it. That and the many small trees popping up in the roadway showed that the road had been closed for some time. We negotiated all obstacles until we came to a place where the road suddenly dropped about three feet, and then kept on going, as if nothing had happened. “Well, that would explain closing the road,” Julie said. We looked at the little cliff and assumed it was the landslide. The thing was it wouldn’t be all that hard to fix and certainly didn’t qualify, in my mind, as “severe.” I felt kind of gypped.

Since the road kept going, we kept walking. Around the next curve, a fallen spruce was blocking the road, and its branches obscured the view ahead. We were about to turn back, but I decided to peek through the branches.

That’s when I saw the real landslide.

It was like someone had taken a giant bite out of the hill with an ice cream scoop, creating an amphitheatre of dirt, rocks, and fallen trees. The gap between the end of the road on our side and the start of the other was at least thirty feet, if not twice that. We crept to the edge of the chasm and looked down probably a hundred feet to the river. Julie dropped a rock over the edge and we listened to it bounce, and bounce, and bounce, and…

Yeah, that was a major landslide. The only way to fix that would be to build a bridge.

Having had our fill of the vista, we turned around, and noticed several deep cracks behind us, paralleling the edge of the drop-off. With a jolt of adrenaline fueling us, we hurried back to the car before the next earthquake catapulted us into the river. We gave each other high fives for finding such a neat thing all by ourselves.

As Julie drove us back, I was refolding the map and not really paying attention when suddenly Julie and Valinda both let out a yelp. A tree had fallen across the road while we were looking at the landslide. It had snapped about fifteen feet up, and just collapsed, forming the hypotenuse of a right triangle, with the road as the bottom edge. Julie backed up thirty feet, just in case any other trees were thinking about toppling. After all, it was a clear day, no wind, no storms, no reason for a seventy-foot tree to just fall over like that. It wasn’t a very thick tree, maybe eight to ten inches in diameter, so our first thought was maybe we could drag it out of the way. Unfortunately, it was such a tall tree that its top was buried in the underbrush far down the hill and we couldn’t budge it, not even an inch.

“Too bad we didn’t bring a chainsaw,” I said.

“Yeah, but we would have had to check our luggage, and you never check your luggage,” Julie replied.

“We should have rented one. Wasn’t that one of the options when we got the car? Extra insurance and a chainsaw?” Valinda added.

Since moving the tree was out, our only options were to walk the six miles to the highway and hope we either got a cell phone signal or a ride to the next town from someone who wasn’t a psycho, or try to drive under the tree. The latter was the obvious choice. The gap was about ten feet at its tallest point, but it was at a steep slant and we weren’t sure we could get the car through. On that side of the road was a small ditch, and an eighteen inch embankment. It might work, but I wasn’t thrilled about doing in our rented sedan (since it was rented in my name). That’s why we made Julie do the driving. If anything happened to the car, we could blame her.

The car just made it.

More high-fives. Wow. What an adventure! The day was chock full of them.

For the next several miles, all we talked about the tree and just how weird it was that it had fallen at just that time, and how if we’d stopped or hadn’t stopped earlier in the day, we might have made it through before the tree fell, or had it fall right on top of us. We thanked the car for doing such a great job getting us under the tree. Your typical adrenaline come-down.

But, the forest looked a little more sinister to me, afterwards.

We stopped at a boat launch to take a look at the river. That’s when Valinda discovered she couldn’t roll up her window. I couldn’t roll mine up, either. It was like the electrical connections to our controls were broken. Valinda wondered if a fuse had blown. I feared it had something to do with getting under the tree. Of course the car didn’t have manual window handles. I imagined the rest of our trip without being able to roll the windows up -- how hard it would be to stop anywhere and leave the car unattended. How bugs and spiders would get in overnight. Not to mention what would happen if it rained. And because I rented it, I was the one who was going to have to deal with getting it fixed.

This, on top of everything else, was just too much adventure for me. I started freaking out. Even though Valinda wanted to walk by the river, but both Julie and I were too worried about the car to relax and we just wanted to get the car back to town, put some gas into it, and call Avis to get the darned thing fixed.

And to think we’d actually thanked that ungrateful hunk of steel for being such a good car!

When we reached Amanda Park, there was a gas station on the right, but because we were looking at the other side of the road, we drove right past it. We decided to keep on going on the naïve assumption that there was more to Amanda Park than the five buildings we’d just passed and that there would be another gas station.

There wasn’t.

You can tell Julie is tense because she gets kind of snappish. It takes a lot to get Julie worked up, so I knew the gas situation must be getting serious. But the more uptight she gets, the more calm I become. A couple of miles further on we saw a sign saying there was a Chevron station at the next left. We took the next left, but there was no station there. After another few minutes of driving, with no sign of a gas station, Julie was ready to turn around and go back. I knew, based on assorted pieces of information I’d gleaned over the course of the trip, that there was a little town called Quinault down this road, which was probably the location of the Chevron. Unfortunately, neither Julie nor Valinda had access to my memory banks and had no idea why I kept telling them in a calm, authoritative voice not to turn around and to just keep on going.

Thank goodness my demeanor was justified. A couple of miles later, we saw the Chevron on the right, and not only was it open, it had gas, and it was also a service station.

While Julie filled the tank, I tried to get a cell phone signal so I could call Avis to ask them what to do about the windows. As I was fussing with the phone, I told the proprietor of the station, an older guy with a thin face, bad teeth, and a snarled grey beard, about the car problem. Being the kind of person who solves problems for a living, he immediately started trying to solve ours. I took the phone across the street, trying to get a signal, while he asked Valinda questions and looked the car over. I had just gotten the auto-attendant for Avis Roadside Assistance when he said he’d found the problem. There was a button on the driver’s side door that locked the passenger windows. He changed the setting, and voila! we had working windows.

At my job, we’d call that an ID ten T error (ID10T).

The guy was very nice about it, and even refused to take our money. I bet he got some laughs about it from his friends, though.

At that point, we were on the south shore of Lake Quinault, and we decided to just drive all the way around it. That took about an hour, not because the lake is that large, but because the loop goes past the lake about six miles up the Quinault river before crossing to the north side. That and the fact that it was a one-lane gravel road.

Back in Amanda Park, we decided to eat before checking into our hotel, the Quinault River Inn. There were two restaurants in town. The one that was closed for business, and the Internet Café restaurant. It was about six pm. After we placed our order, the waitress closed down the restaurant. Business was too slow, she said. Seemed to be a common theme in this part of the woods.

The food was pretty good, but it took forever to arrive. We didn’t get out of there until after seven.

At the Inn’s office, the first thing Julie and I noticed was a little plate of chocolate chip cookies. The inn’s proprietor (whose name I can’t remember, but his dog’s name was Muffin), said Julie could have one, but I was too short so I couldn’t. Whereupon began a verbal boxing match between the two of us, which was quite a lot of fun.

The room was pretty much as standard hotel room, but it was clean and you could easily walk out to the river.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248486164/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248486164/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1248486164/tpod.html Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:43:04 -0400 Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

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Forks, Washington, United States

Julie and Valinda were sound asleep, but I popped awake at 6:30 as I always do. My body doesn't seem to recognize that I’m on vacation, though on the plus side it means my re-entry into "normal" life will be less traumatic.

I dressed as quietly as I could, but still managed to send two tiny bottles of shampoo clattering into the bathroom sink. In my defense, I hadn’t had my coffee yet and was not quite as coordinated as I would be later in the day. If Julie or Valinda were awakened by the noise, neither gave any sign.

Brightwater will provide you with breakfast if you ask for it. It generally consists of muffins, fruit, yogurt, stuff like that. But I wanted a hearty breakfast of eggs and toast and potatoes. And, of course, my mocha. This meant driving to Forks.

In an ideal world, I would find a restaurant that served breakfast, mochas, and had free wi-fi. I drove all the way through town looking for such a place, but alas, didn’t find one, so I settled on the In Place, which served breakfast and was just across the street from an espresso hut called Mocha Motion.

After my breakfast, which was perfectly adequate but non-descript, I set my sights on getting my iced mocha, nearly cracking my head open when I stumbled down a stair I didn’t see because I was looking at the espresso hut, not at where I was walking. Very embarrassing, but I hadn’t had my coffee yet and was not quite as coordinated as I would be later in the day.

I had this theory about why there were espresso huts all over the Olympic Peninsula, even in clearly economically depressed areas. I figured it was because of the Seattle tourists. Everyone knows that the designer coffee fad started in Seattle with Starbucks. It was just after the city burned to the ground in 1870-something, when the Starbucks owner found a bag of coffee beans that had survived the blaze, but were seriously charred. That was the origin of both dark roast and Starbucks’ signature bitter taste.

OK, Valinda made that last part up, but the first part is true. Anyway, I mentioned this idea to the barista who shook her head. “Nope, we get lots of locals. We’re busy all winter.” So much for my theory.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention something about the western side of the Olympic Peninsula. It gets a lot of rain because all of the moisture-laden air from the ocean smacks into the Olympic mountains and dumps its load onto the slopes. The rainforest gets about 12 feet of rain a year, and the driest months are June and July. Naturally, since those are also the months that kids are out of school, it’s when all the tourists arrive. As I pulled out of my parking spot, I was very annoyed at a family of them who were walking down the middle of the street, right in my way. It’s a good thing I’d taken some slugs of coffee before getting into the car, or I might have been uncoordinated enough to back right into them. The two teenaged girls in the group were wearing Twilight T-shirts.

The Forks Visitors Center offered free wi-fi, so I drove over there with the intention of sipping my mocha and working on my blog. Unfortunately, the Center was closed, and though I could access the wi-fi from a bench outside the building, the grounds were swarming with lawn mowers and weed whackers, and the din was simply too distracting for me to do much more than upload a single hastily written entry. That would be whichever entry you thought was the least clever and engaging.

Back at the inn, Valinda and Julie were just finishing up breakfast. Our plan for the day was to go to the Hoh Rainforest. The road sign said it was about 12 miles from Forks, but that didn’t include the 14 mile drive into the park to the entrance gate. The park charges $15 for a pass, but it is good for a week.

I handed the ranger in the toll booth a twenty. While I was waiting for my change, I noticed a sign that said, approximately: “Warning. Recently several elk have charged visitors. Please stay at least 100 feet away from the elk.”

“How much did they charge?” I asked the ranger.

“Five dollars,” he replied, after a short pause and a befuddled look. Good save.

The rest of the day, Valinda and I cracked jokes about the charging elk. Like, “Why do the elk charge?” “Because they’re Hoh elk.” “Why do they only charge $5?” “Because they’re cheap Hohs.” “This gives a new twist to the whole elk harem thing.” “Where do the Hoh elk take you for an assignation?” “To a house of elk repute.” And so on.

Disclaimer: The above jokes are not intended to offend or denigrate the Hoh Native American tribe, elk, whores, or the English language.

The Hoh rainforest was very hot, very humid, and very crowded. Julie noticed that we heard a variety of different languages among the visitors. It seemed to her that there weren’t that many Americans at the park. Her theory was that the peninsula offered lots of things to do, all of which involved physical activity: hiking, biking, kayaking, etc., and that Americans were too fat and lazy to get out and exercise.

There were four hiking trails in the Hoh. The first three were all loops: the Mini-trail, just .1 miles long, was paved and flat and fully accessible. It was designed for small children, the elderly, and those who had trouble walking. We didn’t go on it even though Valinda said it sounded perfect for her (this woman walks four to six miles a day at home, so we ignored her). The next most difficult was the Hall of Mosses, a ¾ mile loop that they termed “easy,” though it seemed pretty difficult to us since half of it was uphill. Luckily it was crowded enough that if you slipped you’d probably just land on another tourist and not get hurt. At the very least the dense, humid air would slow your fall.

Next was the Spruce Nature Trail, 1.25 miles long, which we also walked.

The last available trail, which was not a loop, was the Hoh River trail, which was 18 miles long. We didn’t walk that one. To summarize, there were three very short trails and one designed for exercise freaks. We were all done with Hoh within three hours. Hardly worth the entrance fee.

All in all, I was disappointed by the Hoh. There’d been a lot of build-up about how amazing it was. I thought Cape Flattery had more interesting scenery. Heck, we’d taken a short hike through the woods at Brightwater and that seemed more rainforesty than Hoh had, not to mention quieter. Being surrounded by tourists (including one teen trying to email a photo from her phone) detracted from my experience of "being in the rainforest." But it was not without its consolations. I learned about “nurse logs.”

One of the really weird things about the forests on the peninsula is all the trees you see growing out of other trees. For instance, there might be a totally dead stump, ten feet high, with a new tree growing right out of the top of it. Part of the “cycle of nature” in the rainforests of Washington (and probably elsewhere) is that when a tree falls, many seedlings will take root in the decomposing wood. Most of them won’t survive, but those that do eventually grow roots around the sides of the nurse log down to the ground. In time, the nurse log disintegrates, and you have trees standing on their roots, with big gaps under the trunks where the nurse log had been.

We did see elk at Hoh, but not on any of the trails. The Hoh River runs through the park, and we stopped on our way in and on our way out at various pull-outs to walk out to the river. On the way in, we saw a buck across the river (he didn't charge us). On the way out, Julie and I saw a herd of does and fawns, also across the river. Valinda missed that because she’d taken her shoes off and hadn't wanted to put them back on to take yet another hike. Maybe if we’d left her in the car more often, I would have seen more wildlife!

For dinner, Valinda stayed home and nibbled on leftovers from lunch and Julie and I ate at the Smokehouse. The food was good, though they overcooked my steak, something that pretty much never happens. The service was great and it was a notable exception to the long waits for food that we’d become accustomed to on this trip (another example: we got sandwiches at the supermarket deli to take with us for lunch, and it took like fifteen minutes for the girl to make two sandwiches. And she wasn’t multitasking. She was just really, really slow).

Another joke we made up: The driveway at Brightwater was covered in tiny pine cones. “Why did the pine cone cross the road?” I asked Valinda. “To seed the other side,” she said.
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Forks, Washington, United States

6:45 am. Need Coffee. Clallum Bay may look like the ass-end of nowhere, but it does have some civilizing touches, such as an espresso hut out by the self-storage facility at the edge of town. The barista asked if I had a card, which meant she thought I might be a local. I usually take it as a compliment when I pass as a native in a foreign culture, but this time I did not.

Sandy wore her pearls to breakfast. I didn't notice, but both Valinda and Julie did. They figured she probably didn’t get many opportunities to dress up out here.

The day’s agenda was to drive west to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, which is the northwestern-most point of the continental United States. That whole area is part of the Makah reservation. We’d been warned by other guests at the B&B that you need to get a pass at the mini-mart to spend any time on the reservation. If they hadn’t warned us, well, we might have been in trouble. This wouldn’t be the Makah’s fault though. They have a sign on the highway before you get into town. Two actually. One says, "Visitors, stop and read sign ahead," and the other is the sign to read, which is very large with lots of small print on it. We said, “screw that,” and kept on going.

The pass in question was called a Recreation Pass. I told the gentleman behind the counter that we weren’t planning on having any fun while we were there, so did we really need a recreation pass? That got some laughs. It was suggested that we get in our car and turn around and leave if we didn’t want to have fun.

Cape Flattery itself was quite wonderful. It made me think of a fairy land. There were wooden pathways, and multiple species of moss on the trees, and ferns and ferns and ferns everywhere. Out at the water’s edge, we were high enough to see a seagull and her chicks from above. We also saw cormorants and wild starfish. No orcas though.

Polly, a nature guide, waited at the end of the trail to answer any questions. There was an island a little ways out, with a lighthouse somewhere on it. Flocks of hundreds of gulls floated on the water by its shore, then lifted into the air, circling and squawking. Polly looked through her binoculars and said an eagle was frightening the gulls. As we stood there, fog engulfed the island, and it gradually disappeared from sight. Polly told us that the US had recently given the island back to the tribe, who were surprised because they hadn’t know it wasn’t theirs to begin with. Of course, said Polly, the structures on the island were covered in lead-based paint and had asbestos insulation. Valinda figured the government’s next gift to the Makah would be to make them pay to clean it all up. For their own protection, of course.

After the Cape, we headed down toward Shi Shi Beach. This was a modest hike through an entirely different-looking forest. We had hiked maybe halfway to the beach when Valinda and I realized we were getting pretty tired (not Julie, though. She's a machine). I had this radical idea! There was no law that said we had to walk all the way to the beach! We could turn around if we wanted to, and that is what we did.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I know my words cannot convey what we saw, but neither can my pictures. That’s because I didn’t take very many of them. First, these forests were dark and the lens I’d brought just couldn’t go to a wide enough aperture to get good, clean shots. Second, since my main interest in photography is taking pictures of wildlife, I’d neglected to bring a wide angle lens, which would have done a much better job at conveying the feel of the place than what I had. Perhaps it is just my lack of skill, but I could never find a way to capture the grandeur of a 200-foot Douglas fir with my 55-mm lens.

I’d had this idea I would see all kinds of new birds and squirrels and stuff when I came to Washington, like when I went to Mesa, Arizona and saw a new kind of bird every ten minutes. But that wasn’t turning out to be the case. I never saw any of the various birds chirping and singing in the trees around us, which made it pretty difficult to take pictures of them. And most of the ones I did see were robins and crows, which we I can see at home, though I’d never seen wild robins before, forced to live their lives on beaches and rainforests, with no tidy lawns to hop about on.

Anyway, my camera was just a useless weight around my neck. I was getting photographer’s elbow from cradling it in my arm to give my neck a break. I stopped halfway back and put my camera into my pack. “Now, you know we’ll see some new bird we’ve never seen before,” I told Valinda, and when I looked up there was a woodpecker, of a species I’d never seen before, skittering around on a tree not fifteen feet away. I struggled to get the camera out of the bag, but needless to say, the bird flew off just as I got the camera up to my eye.

I kept the camera around my neck after that. Not that it did me a lot of good.

Our next stop was to be Lake Ozette, and then on to Forks. But we got trapped in a traffic jam. Hard to believe, given how little traffic there was on this road, but construction crews were busily tearing up all the erosion-preventing plant life on the cliff next to the road and had stopped traffic while one of their digger-daggers (as Valinda terms them) struggled with a particularly large tree. By the time we got past that, we decided to skip Ozette and head straight to Forks.

What awaited us in Forks was…. Vampires.

Forks suffers from Twilight mania. The Twilight books, and recent film, are all set in Forks and nearby La Push. We were informed that the author of the books, which feature teenaged vampires and werewolves, had been looking for a spot to set her stories that was foggy and mysterious, and close to Native American land. Her Google search turned up Forks, Washington. There are four books out now, and the one film, with another apparently “in the can.” Twilight fans have flocked on pilgrimage to Forks, reviving its flagging economy (temporarily, at least). Just about every business in town has gotten onto the Twilight bandwagon. The Visitor’s Center has a big sign that says “We [heart] Edward and Bella,” (the teen vampires) and an information desk devoted solely to Twilight. Hotels advertise “Twilight Rooms” (though one has a prominent sign stating, “Edward Cullen didn’t sleep here”). The local Subway is the home of the Twilight Sandwich. There are several stores on the main street devoted to selling Twilight memorabilia, and even the supermarket has a Twilight section.

It was rather nauseating, actually.

We stayed at Brightwater House, a B&B a little northwest of Forks. Part of the reason I chose it was that it had a river running through the property (the Sol Duc river), and because their website said they sometimes saw elk in the fields in front of the house (and no, I never saw any there). We had a large suite in the converted barn. The room was very nice, but our proprietor, Richard, got on my nerves. He’s a smart guy and all, but all he does is talk. Listening is a concept he has not learned to grasp, and he’s in his sixties. I’m thinking he’ll never get it. Maybe it comes from being a professor of archaeology for many years. Regardless, after the first few interesting stories, I got bored with the monologue, and then actively annoyed. I started avoiding him (not that we had all that many interactions with him). I don’t think he is a very happy man. How could you be, when you don't think anyone else has anything interesting to say?

His dog, Lucy was happy, though, and his cat, Tik Tik, was the most catlike cat I’ve ever met. He had about zero interest in human beings. He was nice enough as long as you let him run the show, but apparently had a habit of biting people who made the mistake of touching him without his permission.

For dinner, we drove down to La Push, on the Ozette Indian reservation. The town’s name has degenerated from the original moniker applied by the French settlers (or invaders): La Bouche, meaning The Mouth as this is where the Sol Duc river flows into the Pacific Ocean.

There is one restaurant in La Push, called the River’s Edge. After we were seated, we waited and waited and waited for our waitress (she shouldn’t have taken her title so seriously). After we ordered, we waited and waited for our food. Then we waited and waited and waited for our check. This kind of slow service was something we were to experience quite often on our journey down the western part of the Olympic Peninsula.

Julie and Valinda ordered exactly the same meal, a seafood medley sautéed in white wine and butter sauce. Valinda originally wanted to order sautéed scallops, but was told they were only serving them fried because the scallops were too small to be sautéed. There were scallops in the sautéed seafood medley, though. Go figure.

When their meals arrived, you’d never know they were the same dish. Julie’s bowl had a collection of different seafood items and some vegetables. Valinda’s looked like soup. We figured the cook had scooped out Julie’s meal, and then dumped what was left in the pan into Valinda’s bowl. You’ve got to wonder about a cook who would serve the exact same meal to two people at the same table, yet not make the presentations the same.

Later, we had more reason to believe the guy was a little off. Just as we were getting our check, he started yelling at the other waitress, “Close the restaurant! I’m out of salad!” The waitress rolled her eyes in disbelief, as did just about everyone else in the restaurant. It’s not like you go out to eat there for their iceberg lettuce salad bar. But the cook was adamant. “I’ve got no salad! I’ve got nothing to feed people!”

“But, I just seated two parties of six,” the waitress replied.

“I’ll find something to feed them!” he yelled back. “Just close.” So she flipped the door sign, but you could tell she thought he was a jerk. I was glad to get out of there and would absolutely not recommend eating there. Find somewhere in Forks, preferably a place with garlic hanging over the door.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247845544/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247845544/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247845544/tpod.html Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:52:57 -0400 Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

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Clallam Bay, Washington, United States

Having completed our one guided tour for the trip, we now began the main part of our vacation, which was six days on the Olympic Peninsula, just across the Puget Sound from Seattle. This day, we had to drive from Anacortes to a town called Clallam Bay.

We took it easy, sleeping until eight. Many of our clothes were still wet from our kayaking trip, and we put some of those in the trunk of the car, and some of them in the back window to dry.

The first item on my agenda (and since I was driving, my agenda was the only agenda) was to get coffee. If you have ever read my other travel blogs, you'll know just how important my morning large-iced-mocha-with-skim-milk-and-half-the-chocolate is to me. Yesterday, I knew I wouldn’t have time to find a coffee shop and had prepared by purchasing a nasty Starbucks-in-a-can concoction. But today I needed the real thing.

On the way out of town, I found an espresso hut. These are little buildings just big enough to hold an espresso machine, a mini-fridge, and a counter. You drive up to the window and place your order. They are all over the place on the peninsula. In fact, every time we see a tiny building now we are certain it sells espresso.

Getting out of town turned out to be as difficult as getting into town had been. We ran into a detour. There were two options. To take highway 20 east to Bellingham, or to follow Commercial Avenue.

Still being unclear on the concept of how highway 20 actually worked, but knowing that we did not want to go east to Bellingham, we wanted to go south to the Keystone ferry, we took the Commercial Avenue detour. It took us into a residential district, up one street and over a few blocks around here and there. Then we reached the end of the detour. We knew this because there was a sign that said "End Detour." But the road ahead was barricaded with a “Road Closed” sign and many big digging machines were tearing it up. What the point of that detour was, we never figured out. We backtracked and took 20 to Bellingham.

Soon we saw signs about the ferry and followed them. Anacortes is on a hunk of land that looks like a peninsula, but is really part of the mainland. But the ferry is on an island (I think it’s called Whidbey Island). When we crossed the bridge onto the island, there was a sign that said “No Left Turn Next 1/3 Mile.” We wondered how many people had tried making left turns off the bridge. Maybe this had something to do with why the area is called Deception Pass? Or just one more example of really bad signage.

The plan was to catch the ferry from Keystone to Port Townsend on the peninsula, and drive onward to our B&B in Clallum Bay. But I was a bit concerned that the ferry signs all said it was highly recommended that you get a reservation. So when we stopped for breakfast at a non-descript restaurant, I called the ferry. There was a recorded announcement that no reservations were available until six pm. I hung up in a panic and looked at the time. It was about ten am. I got this sinking feeling in my stomach. If we had to wait until six to get across to the peninsula… our whole trip would be ruined! Because we were on an island we could either drive back up to Anacortes and down I-5 to Seattle, then cross the Puget Sound on a ferry. Or we could continue driving to the far southern point of the island and take a different ferry to the mainland, drive to Seattle, and take the ferry from there across the Puget Sound. In other words, all my options sucked. Then Julie, ever rational and cool-headed, pointed out they can’t expect everyone to have a reservation. I had hung up as soon as I heard the bad news, and when I called back they did indeed say they kept a number of spots available for people without reservations if they got there an hour in advance. Looking at the schedule, we determined we couldn’t catch the noon ferry, but could certainly get on the one-thirty.

With that traumatic setback resolved, I was able to eat my breakfast.

We got to the ferry at about 11:45 and it was just pulling in. The way it works is that they stop letting cars into the lot when they think they have enough to fill the ferry. Everyone else lines up outside the ticket booth and are let into the lot if there may be room on the ferry, and if there isn’t room they wait for the next one. There was one guy ahead of us in line. I hardly dared hope we could get onto the noon boat. The ferry started loading up cars, and the ticket guy talked on his walkie-talkie, and he let several more cars into the lot, including us. He said he couldn’t promise we’d get on this ferry. We pulled into lane 4 to wait, but in just minutes we were waved onto the ferry’s deck.

Talk about luck! Thank goodness for Julie. I would have had us doing some harebrained detour.

Clallam Bay is something like 50 miles from Port Townsend, so we figured we had plenty of time to get to the B&B as it was only about 12:30 when we de-ferried. We moseyed along highway 101. At Sequim (pronounced Squim), we took a few detours looking for Roosevelt elk, which hang out in that area. We didn’t see any, so we drove out to the Dungeness Spit, the longest sand spit in the country. It’s like a crooked finger of sand five and a half miles long.

Next to finding espresso, my next most pressing need on my travels is finding restrooms. I haven’t bored you with the trials and tribulations I experienced on this trip, but when we reached the spit, I was desperate for a bathroom. We arrived at a parking lot and looked at a posted map of the park. According to the map, there was a restroom just behind the You Are Here point. Well, I looked and looked, finding it increasingly difficult to walk, and couldn’t find it. Finally, we drove on to the trailhead, and guess what? That’s where the bathrooms were. The You Are Here marker on the map at the trailhead was in the same place as the one on the map half mile back. Boy was I pissed!

Just so you know, you have to pay $3 (for up to 4 adults) to walk on the spit.

All of the wet clothing we’d put into the back window had dried, so we moved the damp stuff from the trunk to the window to dry while we were walking on the spit.

The spit consists of sand and rocks, and right down the middle of it is a barricade made by the tides of giant bleached white logs. I found walking on the sand and rocks to be tiring, so while Julie and Valinda took a long walk down the spit, I tried to take pictures of seabirds. The problem was that there weren’t any seabirds around. It was quite frustrating.

When we got back to the car and opened the doors, we were assaulted with this horrendous stench of rubber and old socks. That was the smell of our neoprene water boots after being broiled in a hot car for several hours. It took several more hours for the smell to dissipate.

There are lots of cool things to do on the north part of the Olympic peninsula, but we didn’t have time for them anymore. We had to get to Clallam Bay. We had a choice of taking 101, which is a major highway that heads inland, or 112, a smaller road that goes along the coast. We chose 112. It was a beautiful drive. Very remote. We saw few cars, and fewer habitations. The road wound up and down mountains, which surprised us since we figured on this being a coastal road. There was some confusion on the part of the sign-makers, however. The speed limit, when not on a mountain (almost never) was 50. Then you’d see a sign telling you the speed limit was 40 mph. Followed almost immediately by another sign saying the speed limit was 30 mph for the next mile. Followed shortly thereafter by a sign telling you to go 20 mph around a particularly tight curve.

Suddenly, my phone beeped at me. I had gotten a text message. This was strange since I don’t do txtng bcuz i hav compulsive need 2 spel evrythg out in prpr Englsh. The message was from AT&T, telling me that International Data rates of $15.36/MB were in effect.

As far as AT&T was concerned, I’d left the country! I had no idea just how remote this place was.

All those hills added a lot of time to the trip, so we didn’t get to Clallam Bay until about seven. It looked like a fishing village that had fallen on hard times. I hoped that this was just the “bad” part of town, but no, it was the whole town. I was worried that our B&B, the Winter Summer Inn, would be kind of awful, like the town itself. It was located right on the main street across from a split-pea green building so ramshackle that it appeared uninhabitable. But apparently it housed an operational business since it had a big rainbow sign saying “Art Gallery” in front. The Inn didn’t look like a dump, but the paint on the porch was peeling. Given the surroundings, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake in choosing these accommodations, though Sandy, the proprietor, had been the most professional of everyone I’d dealt with when making the plans and certainly the only one to send me a confirmation of my reservation.

Thankfully, the inside of the house was very nice and it had a beautiful deck overlooking the Clallam river. The house itself had been built back in the 1800’s, when Clallam Bay was an important port. All the goods from Canada came into Clallam Bay before being sent south to Seattle. Why, Sandy wondered out loud, had they passed up such an opportunity to become a major port city, like Seattle was? I didn’t have an answer, but I had several ideas:

1) Clallam Bay was run by honest folk, and the scoundrels in Seattle managed to steal all the business (see day 2 entry).
2) Maybe Clallam Bay was easy to get to by water, but overland it’s practically impossible.
3) The data rates from AT&T were too expensive.

The room we’d chosen, the Quilt Room, had two beds. It was smaller than it looked on the internet. They just have used a serious wide-angle lens to get the photo. But since we were only there for the night, and it had a big Jacuzzi tub, which we took advantage of, we were happy enough.

Sandy is a small, vivacious woman, with short blond hair and blue eyes. She didn’t seem to be the type of person you’d find all alone out in the middle of nowhere, though if you were to find her in such a place, running a B&B is exactly what you’d expect her to be doing. Sandy and her husband used to live near Seattle. About three years ago, her husband told her he was retiring and they bought the B&B in Clallam Bay. Sandy quit her job, and moved up to Clallam Bay. Her husband kept saying he was going to retire soon. Soon. Soon. He’s still down by the city. Sandy is starting to wonder whether he’s ever coming up there. She said it with a smile, but I think it’s starting to hurt her.

She seems like this really sweet lady, but she definitely has a steel edge. Years ago, one of her teenaged sons was failing to clean his room despite her repeated entreaties. So she nailed his clothes to the floor. He kept his room clean after that.

Julie and Valinda went for a walk through town, but I thought that seemed too dreary and sat out on the deck, writing. When they returned, they reported that they’d seen many slugs along the way. Valinda wrote a haiku:

Walking on the path
We saw a pile of dog poop
A banana slug
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247800936/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247800936/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247800936/tpod.html Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:38:10 -0400 Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

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Friday Harbor, Washington, United States

Sometimes I have difficulty having fun. Well, most of the time, actually. On this trip, I took care of all the planning and the logistics. Each time we are faced with a particular schedule point, my anxiety level increases until we've successfully negotiated the task at hand.

There were many tasks to be accomplished on this day. We were going kayaking on the straits around the San Juan Islands, in the hopes of seeing orca, or at least porpoises or harbor seals.

First, we had to make the ferry from Anacortes to Friday Harbor. I determined that if we didn’t catch the 8:45 am ferry, we’d run too great a risk of missing the pick-up for the trip. I woke at 5:30 am, and looked out the loft windows at a stunning view of majestic pines towering above the sea. I was about to go back to sleep when I saw a small yellow and black bird with an orange face. I’d never seen one like that before. So I scurried down the ladder, grabbed my camera, scooted around Valinda’s bed, and went out into the chill of the morning in my jammies. Of course, the bird disappeared as soon as it sensed a camera in the vicinity, and the only bird that wasn’t in hiding was a robin. Like I couldn't see those at home. I wandered around the grounds, charmed by little touches like the pond and waterfall. Tucker watched me from the deck of the house.

By the time I got back, Valinda and Julie were up. I hurried them out the door to the ferry (they didn’t see the urgency, which just made me more anxious), and we got to the terminal with plenty of time to spare. The ferry arrived at Friday Harbor at 10, and the kayak outfitter’s van was scheduled to arrive at noon. I wanted to sit under the tree at the rendezvous point and wait two hours, but Julie and Valinda insisted on walking around town. The whole downtown area is nothing but your typical waterfront tourist trap, but there were some nice houses along the residential streets. When the vans pulling the kayaks arrived at the rendezvous, several of the other kayakers weren’t there yet, so the outfitters waited for the second ferry to come in. We hadn’t needed to catch the 8:45 at all.

Our guide was Kim, a young woman who’d spent most of her adult career working as a counselor in wilderness camps for troubled teens. After burning out on that, she’d started leading adult wilderness adventures. She found it to be quite a relief to be dealing with adults who actually wanted to be going on the trip!

In her profession, she's constantly moving from place to place looking for work. She’d been in the San Juan islands for all of two months. I tried not to think that this could be a problem.

Kim and her fellow guide, Randy, took us out to the launch site, and then explained that usually the water is as smooth as glass, but today the wind was fourteen knots, and that "small craft advisories" go out at ten knots. Therefore, we’d have to stay close to shore and probably not travel as far as on a normal trip. OK, I thought, maybe we'd still get to see some cool marine mammals.

The most important part of our training session was not on what to do if you capsize, but on how to get into and out of a kayak. Randy, in his eight years of guiding such trips, has never had anyone capsize, but has had people break wrists and noses when getting out of kayaks on dry land because they stood up in the boat and it tipped over, throwing them into rocks, other kayaks, or angry geese (okay, I made the last one up, but that would hurt, too).

Julie and I shared a kayak. She was in the back steering, and I was in the front. Valinda, since she was the odd-woman out in our party, got to ride with Kim.

Normally they take you south around this point, but the wind was far too strong for that, so we turned back before reaching it and headed north. The waves were pretty intense. Sometimes the kayak would hit air, and slap down again into the water, spraying ocean all over my sunglasses, leaving a rime of salt that made it increasingly difficult to see. The wind picked up while we were out there. By the time we stopped for lunch, it was up to twenty knots out in the middle of the strait. Basically, our trip consisted of several hours fighting chop. I am rarely on the ocean, so I forget how three dimensional it is. Swells came at us from all directions. Julie struggled to master the art of steering with her foot pedals, periodically crashing us into other kayaks, or veering toward the cliffs (I took my turn at it after lunch, and it definitely took getting used to). Even though Julie is a strong paddler, we always ended up trailing everyone else, and Kim had to wait around for us to catch up. Valinda thought that was great because she'd get a break when paddling.

At lunch, we discovered one of the other women in the group also lived in Minneapolis. Small world.

We received several lectures during the day. We learned that kelp makes an excellent anchor, an interesting horn, and is edible if you don’t mind the taste and texture. It is also practically impossible to paddle through. The kelp up there is seasonal, and can grow as much as six feet a day. Because it is only around in the summer, it does not attract sea otters. Canada Geese can apparently live on salt water. There are three pods of resident orcas in the straits, and they "speak" a different “dialect” from the orca pods who live up in Alaska, and a different one still from the transient orcas, who have a much wider range and eat sea mammals as well as the fish the residents subsist on.

All of that was very interesting, but we saw no orcas, no porpoises, and only one harbor seal and her pup, but from such a distance, they could have been logs for all I could tell through my salt-encrusted glasses. We also caught a glimpse of some oyster catchers and some bald eagles, but since we see bald eagles all the time at the cabin, they weren’t a big deal.

I’d expected to see at least some wildlife on the trip, even if it wasn’t orcas. Without that expectation, the trip would have been fun and challenging all on its own, but because of the expectation, I was disappointed.

When packing for the trip, I thought they’d gone a little overboard with the warnings to bring wool sweaters and socks and rain gear, but it was chilly enough that I ended up wearing all of it. The thing I’d forgotten, though, was that when I came out of the water, my shoes and pants would be wet and it would be nice to have something dry to put on. After the van returned us to town, we had time enough for dinner at the Ale House before the ferry arrived. Valinda left a puddle on the floor under our table.

Washington seems to draw people from all over the world. We stopped for an ice cream before getting on the ferry, and the girl who served us had a Russian-sounding accent. I asked where she was from, and she said Moldova.

Back at the Troll House, we decided to get into the hot tub to unwind from our strenuous adventure. I had a bathing suit, while Julie and Valinda made due with bras, shorts, and underwear. The water seemed kind of tepid to me, and the thermometer said it was a little under 100 degrees. Let’s see, if my body temperature is about 98.6, is 99 degrees going to seem very warm? Not really. We turned on the heater, but it didn’t make a lot of difference. Still, we hung around in our warm tub for another twenty minutes and cracked bad jokes until we exhausted ourselves with laughter.

Notes about the Troll House: There is no internet access, and no cell phone service for AT&T and Verizon.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247756909/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247756909/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mlloyd/4/1247756909/tpod.html Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:13:45 -0400 Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

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Anacortes, Washington, United States

OK, I was wrong. There is a Starbucks on just about every block, at least in downtown Seattle. And if it isn't a Starbucks, it’s a Tully’s.

Valinda and I had no plans for this day, our last in Seattle, nor did we have a car to implement whatever plans we might have had. Unlike yesterday, it was overcast and a little chilly. We checked out of the hotel, but left our luggage in their care. The plan was to pick up a rental car at about four, pick Julie up at about six, and drive up to Anacortes for the next segment of our adventure. That left roughly seven hours with nothing in particular to do. I was feeling quite worn out from mountain climbing the day before, and I had that kind of phlegmy feeling in my throat like you sometimes get before the onset of a cold. Therefore, I did not want to do anything strenuous, such as walking to another neighborhood, or do anything novel that would require a lot of attention and probably provoke anxiety, such as taking a bus to another neighborhood. So we walked down some hills, and then up some hills and then down some hills to the Seattle Art Museum sculpture garden by Elliot Bay.

It was a bit of a disappointment. There wasn’t a lot of sculpture there, at least when compared to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. One red neon ampersand spun around on a tall pole, and periodically appeared to squeak and let out a little pfft of air, like a fart. Very avant-garde. (We later discovered the ampersand was actually silent, and a train was responsible for the sound effects.)

A bit farther along, I was getting ready to take pictures of a crowd of crows (crows are extremely common in this part of Washington), when there was a clap of thunder followed moments later by a soaking rain. We were in a park near the water, far from any structure except a port-a-potty. For the record, there are limits to what I consider "any port in a storm." We huddled under a tree.

After the little storm petered out, I was very wet and cold and more tired than ever. We lost interest in hiking further through the park since the sky was still cloudy and occasionally spitting at us. So we trudged back into town in a sort of random pattern, attempting to avoid hills, and waiting to get hungry enough for lunch so we could go inside somewhere warm and sit down. We passed a hair salon called “Beauty is Pain,” and the Mars Hill church, which had three security guards out front. First time I’ve ever seen security guards at a church.

Eventually we ended up back at the convention center. The convention center was our sanctuary in the city, a place where we could sit unmolested and use the restroom as many times as we needed to without having to buy something.

The problem was it was barely two in the afternoon and we had to kill an hour and a half before walking to get the car. I decided to have a Coke in the hopes that the caffeine would wake me up, and we watched the veterinarians at the AVMA conference hurrying here and there, hoping to catch sight of Julie.

The caffeine worked (and all that soda was why I needed the restrooms to be so readily available), so I was ready to roll when it was time to pick up the car. The first thing we did after getting the car was pick up the luggage from the hotel. After that, we still had an hour and a half until Julie was done. I thought it would be great to park the car and not do anything risky, but since we couldn’t find a parking place anywhere within ten blocks, we went with Valinda’s plan, which was to drive out to Washington Park to have a look around.

The plan was simple. Drive on this major road through the park, which looped back and connected to 23rd (or 28th) Avenue (or Street), and back down to Madison, and then to the hotel. But somehow we missed the turn and pretty soon I was on this bridge over Lake Washington, on my way to Bellingham. I kept badgering Valinda to tell me where we were and what exit I should get off at, but she couldn’t figure out the maps on my iPhone, and the little Seattle map provided by the hotel only covered the downtown area. The bridge went on and on. It’s over two miles long, in fact. Lake Washington should be the sixth Great Lake it’s so huge. I got off at the first exit, and thank goodness there was an on ramp to go back to the city.

My first reaction was to immediately go back to the hotel and park, but Valinda convinced me to stop briefly in the park to look around. I’m glad we did. It was gorgeous.

When we got back to the hotel, we actually found a parking spot! Julie showed up shortly thereafter and we began the next segment of our trip, going north to Anacortes.

We’d arranged to spend two nights at the Troll House Cottage. We had a little trouble getting there. The ride up I-5 was easy enough, and we got onto highway 20 with no problem. We were looking for a place where 20 split, with one fork heading south and the other north. According to Google, I was to take the south fork, but it was about seven pm and we hadn’t eaten yet, and since Valinda was navigating, I asked Julie to call the Troll House to see if they could recommend a restaurant on the way. The couple who own the inn are elderly, and probably hard of hearing because the gentleman started giving Julie directions to the inn instead of to a restaurant. Julie, who’d never even seen a map of where we were headed, threw up her hands and gave the phone to Valinda, which meant that when I saw a confusing sign up ahead about where to turn on highway 20, Valinda was busy on the phone and couldn’t tell me which way to go.

So naturally, I went the wrong direction.

Luckily, it didn’t really matter though because at that point highway 20 is essentially a loop. Still, it threw me for a loop. We did successfully find both food and the Troll House.

The owners, whose names I don’t remember, were surprised to see three of us, even though I’d discussed that with them when making the arrangements. I’d sent them a 50% deposit and when I asked what the final amount would be, they didn’t know how much I’d already paid. Don’t get me wrong, they’re really good people, it’s just that the business end of their business is run in a somewhat less-than-professional manner. The female of the couple, it turned out, had been born in Norway and had moved to the United States as a young woman. She’d lived in Minneapolis for a number of years, and used to hang out at the Sons of Norway, just a few blocks from where Julie and I live. Small world.

The Troll House is an adorable little cottage located high on a hill overlooking the Strait of San Juan del Fuca (or something like that—forgive me, but I don’t have internet access to check these details). There’s a deck with a “private hot tub,” according to the brochure. It’s private, as long as you don’t mind the proprietors being able to watch you from their house across the driveway.

The place was quite small, with the bed taking up the entire loft--I only bashed my head three times going up before I got the hang of doing it without harming myself. Valinda slept on a pull-out bed which took up the whole living room. Somehow, we managed. The star of the show was Tucker, a lynx-point Siamese cat who cuddled with us at every opportunity, as long as we were outside--he’d been trained to stay out of the cottage.

Notice that I remembered Tucker’s name.
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