melodyssister | Entries tagged with travels: wa

We had very high expectations of Portland, and it mostly lived up to them. Our vague plan back in DC was to go to Powell's bookshop, SockDreams' brick and mortar store and the Rose Garden. We managed to do two out of three, and several other things, too.

We started by parking at Washington Park, which is the cheapest place to park, and on the way to the Rose Garden we walked through the Hoyt Arboretum. The Arboretum has thousands of fully-grown trees, and walking through it is almost like walking through a natural forest. in fact, it is what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like - a green piece of nature in the middle of the town. The Japanese Garden, across the road from the Rose Garden, had been recommended to us, but we decided (mostly at my urging, I must admit) to skip it in favour of the roses. I love rose gardens, and this is really an impressive one. We spent over an hour wandering through bed after bed of roses of every colour, smelling them. Our favourites were Young Lycidas, which smelt just like Turkish delight; Elle, which had a more citrusy rose scent; and Barbra Streisand, which was a combination of the three. If I ever grow roses (Jerusalem is not the ideal climate, I fear, and our window boxes get very little sun), I would pay more attention to their scent than to their appearance, and I'd like one of those.

By this time it was nearly noon, and we took the park shuttle to the MAX station, and then took the train to Pioneer Square, where we had lunch (Chinese steamed dumplings and Voodoo doughnuts) from food trucks and listened to live music, before setting off to Powell's bookshop, rightly called a city of books. We decided to limit ourselves to two books each, and urged the children to buy second-hand, as those books tended to be both cheaper and lighter. We reluctantly dragged ourselves away after just over two hours (ADC said to me: Can't me move in to this shop, to live?), feeling that we had only scratched the surface. I would have happily bought more - we are now considering sending all our books, except those we plan to read on the flight, home by mail so as to free up space and weight in our suitcases - and I am very glad that we went there. It makes me happy to know that such place still exists, despite Amazon and Kindle.

After the bookshop, we experienced the least satisfying part of the day, walking down to the Willamette River and generally wandering around. Maybe we were not in the right places, but it was much less exciting than we expected. Did all the Portlanders go inside to escape the heat (it became significantly hotter as the day went on, hitting 30 around four o'clock)? What we did see was lots and lots of homeless people, far more than anywhere I've ever seen, either in the US or in Europe. I wonder if homeless people, who can easily die of exposure in East Coast winters, move to Portland to find a place with both a mild climate and a tradition of liberalism. Maybe there is more help for them there? It was unnerving going into parks, as almost all the benches were occupied by people and what were clearly all their worldly goods. Homelessness seems such a structural problem that I don't know that small amounts of cash (and who do you choose to give it to?) is of any help.

I will now sound very heartless and shallow, I'm sure, by saying that my mood improved by finding a cupcake bakery and a games shop, and buying their respective wares. Certainly the people who told us we would like Portland were thinking of the shops - although we didn't get to SockDreams, as it is in a relatively outlying neighbourhood, not served by the trams. We ended the day at the Davis Street Tavern, where I had a more interesting meal than the previous day (kale and mushroom risotto beats stir-fry any day), and ADC enjoyed the charcuterie board very much.

Tomorrow will be along day, as we set off to see the Columbia Gorge ...

On Wednesday night, shortly after I wrote my last entry, once it became fully dark we went down to the docks. ASC and the boys went rowing, in the hopes of seeing bioluminescence, while I stayed on the docks and joined a group of students who were "night lighting": sending down an electric light into the water to see what might be attracted. I think that we were very lucky: a huge nereus worm swam around and around, there was a salmon migration and one swam into the net held by one of the students - I don't know who was more surprised, him or the salmon, and best of all, a harbor seal swam by really close: you could count each of his whiskers!

Our last full day on San Juan Island was spent at the north end, thanks to a kind neighbour who lent usher car. We started at English Camp, where the British garrison lived during the joint Anglo-American occupation of the island from 1849-1871 until the Kaiser's arbitration awarded the San Juan Island s to the United States rather than to Canada, then walked up Young Hill for a fantastic view of Haro Strait across to British Columbia, and finally visited the resort of Roche Harbor, clearly where you go if you have a yacht. We found three geocaches, which pleased A greatly.

We left Friday Harbor in the rain, similar to what we had woken up to on our first morning there. The trip back to the mainland was uneventful, although this time we knew to choose seats around a table with a jigsaw puzzle. I knitted and occasionally helped the others, and we completed the puzzle as the ferry drew in to port at Anacortes. Once we disbarred, we quickly found the rental car agent, who took us in a pick-up truck into the actual town of Anacortes ("salmon canning capital of the world"), where we spent much longer than anticipated actually getting the rental car. Part of that was despite ADC having called to confirm, they didn't have a full-sized sedan that could take five suitcases, so we had to take a midi-SUV, which needed its oil changed before being driven to California. We went to have lunch - which was very nice - but took about twice as long as we thought it would. Clearly the Pacific North West lives at a different tempo than the East Coast. As a result, we only made a brief stop at Deception Bridge, instead of a proper hike, on our way to IB and E's place in Bellevue.

It was lovely to see them again, after such a long time. IB was in ADC's class in high school, and he has known E since the army, before they became a couple. Their eldest daughter, Y, is eight months older than A, and their second daughter, AM, is the same age as S. They also have a much younger daughter, N. The five children got on amazingly well together, considering that they had't seen each other in about five years. Some of the time they split into a pair and a trio, other times they were all together, but they all played nicely.

Saturday in Seattle began with pouring rain, so we got up slowly, had pancakes for breakfast and only left for Pike Place Market aound 11:00. As well as having a late lunch there, we bought provisions for a picnic supper, while watching a Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing by GreenStage. That was the highlight of the day - despite a light drizzle falling intermittently, it was not too cold, and the production was very good. There was great chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick (who was fantastic, I had him autograph my programme), and as usual, I failed to understand the possibility of Hero and Claudius having a happy ever after. Next day, while discussing the play, S said - on hearing that Kenneth Branagh had also played Benedick - that of course he had, since Hamlet and Benedick were really very similar. I think that there is definitely a seminar paper there, since I think that their main similarity was being written by a man who gave the main characters the best lines.*

Next day was much better weather, cloudy and cool but not raining (at least once we had crossed the Cascades to the east). We set off on a hike to Gold Creek Pond, where Y and I took the wrong turning and walked the loop in the other direction from everyone else. Quite frankly, I wasn't bothered, as Y knows a great deal about the local native flowers - her school has a module on them during sixth grade and she remembered a lot. I really enjoyed spotting flowers with someone who was also enthusiastic (rather than mainly humouring me and much more interested in birds). There were far more flowers around the lake than there had been on San Juan Island, and Y also identified various ferns and flowers that are not in my mini guide, so that was also very useful for the future, too. Once we were done at Gold Creek Pond, we continued to Snoqualmie Falls, a waterfall and the oldest underground hydro-electric plant in the world. The falls were quite small, since we are in the driest time of year and the past winter was very mild, but still impressive enough. After that, our hosts went to an art fair, and we went shopping, to stock up for our road trip south.

Monday was devoted to Mt St Helens. The forecast being for warmer weather now that the weekend was over, we all wore shorts, forgetting that we would be significantly higher than in Seattle - and we weren't dressed warmly enough. That is my only complaint, though - the views of the mountain were incredible, and visibility improved as the day went on and as we went higher. We went to three visitor centres, one telling the story of the 1980 volcanic eruption, one about the return of the forest (much more quickly than expected), and one about the current monitoring and observation of the mountain and its volcano. Each one was at a different altitude with different flowers. I found the human stories of the people who survived very moving, and the differences between the treatment of public and private land in the aftermath was very interesting. Public land became the Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument, and was left to recover with almost no human intervention, while on private land, which was largely owned by logging companies, the first order of the day was to salvage as much of the lumber from the trees blown down by the lateral blast of the mountainside as possible.

We were tired and hungry by the time we reached our final destination of the day, Vancouver WA. After checking in, we went in search of a restaurant, and found a very pleasant Hawaiian place called Tommy O's. Everyone was very happy with their choice, and especially with their desserts.

* Except for Romeo and Juliet, there Mercutio has the best lines.

Woohoo! I have just finished uploaded edited versions of the nine articles I had to read while at FHL, and send a summary of my comments to my co-editors. That was a marathon ten days, during which I edited another article (I'll be paid for that one, though), but now I'm done! ADC also finished writing his article, up to and including figure legends an acknowledgements, so tomorrow our holiday can really start.

Not that this hasn't been a partial holiday, anyway, of course. On Saturday we took the bus to Limekiln Park, aka Whale Watch Park, where we had a very enjoyable time hiking. We almost missed seeing orcas, as they were not in the vicinity most of the time, and in fact we only saw a few in the distance just before we had to leave the lighthouse viewing spot in order to catch the last bus. ADC was rather disappointed, as the potential was much greater than the actuality turned out, but the rest of us were thrilled anyway. We also saw a golden eagle while we were hiking, which was almost as impressive.

We followed up the whale theme by going to the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor yesterday (Tuesday). It was almost as much of a trek to get there as it was to the park, on the other side of the island, because we made the bad mistake of ordering sandwiches to go from a coffee shop, rather than the deli, in town. I've never had to wait 50 minutes for sandwiches before, and not been offered any kind of recompense or apology, not even a glass of water while we waited. The staff was overwhelmed by the lunch crowd (which struck us as being probably normal for the height of tourist season), and the single woman making the sandwiches was clearly not a professional: not only did she mix up orders (part of the reason for the delay), but she was incredibly slow and inefficient. I think that even S, who spends part of his time on another planet, could have worked faster. Adding insult to injury, when we mentioned how long we had been waiting to the staff, one of the women said "We're not a restaurant" - well, if you can't cope with a "to go" option, why offer it? And in the end, neither the sandwiches nor the cookies we bought were very good.

The Whale Museum was not what I expected. It was smaller than I thought it would be, a bit over-didactic and had almost nothing on the relations between humans and whales throughout history. I was expecting a museum with much more about whaling, but apparently that was never a major industry here, only further north, in Canada and Alaska. The in-depth studies and genealogical charts of the pods of the southern resident orcas were interesting, though, even though I felt that the anthropomorphism was a bit much: yes, whales are clearly intelligent, but they are not human.

After the museum, ADC went back to work, while the boys and I wandered around window shopping. We went into a place called Island Studios, selling arts and crafts made by locals. I was shocked to see ruffle scarves, made with the kind of yarn I had to match in the yarn shop here and which costs about $6 per ball, for sale for over $40!!

The boys have taken up geocaching with a vengeance: today they spent all afternoon wandering round town by themselves, looking for caches. They had a false start,as after they got to town A discovered his batteries had run out. When they arrived home, S discovered that his hat (which he had been wearing) was missing. He borrowed A's spare and they set off again, and found two caches and S's hat (it was next to the hutch where you could buy eggs on the honour system). Lucky boy!

This has been an incredibly productive week - ADC even finished the first draft of his article, and only has the figures and drawings to do, so coming to Friday Harbor has been very worthwhile for him, and I have gone through half of the articles for the special issue on medicine that I am co-editing. While the two of us have been at work, the boys have done a lot of exploring and holiday homework: A has made a lot of progress catching up on geometry, while S has listened to an audiobook of White Fang (an abridged version, by OxfordOwl) and written a new ending of over 600 words. This was his summer homework from his school in Israel, so I'm pleased that's done.

What else have we been up to? Last Sunday we walked back into town and explored what was there apart form the market and supermarket. We went down to the harbour itself and watched people setting off on a whale watch ($70-100 a person, I think we'll begin by seeing what we can see from land. Tomorrow we are going to a park semi-officially known as Whale Watch Park), before locating the San Juan Transit station, from which we would take the bus that goes to that park (the blue route) or to the alpaca farm (the green route), where I had been planning to buy yarn for myself and

eumelia, until we walked out of an ice cream shop and I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye: Island Wools. As you can imagine, as soon as I finished my ice-cream I went inside, and immediately became overwhelmed. The young woman behind the counter was very welcoming, and showed me the alpaca yarn she had: not from the farm on San Juan Island, but from the next one. The yarn was a bit disappointing to me, as it was much thicker than I really wanted - alpaca is really warm, so not that useful in Israel, and I was planning to use it together with another yarn, a ribbon yarn in a wine colour. As soon as she said that there was a range of yarns that were hand-dyed in the shop, I knew that that was what I wanted. I must say that everyone else was very understanding of me - not to say enabling; S found a pattern for a Robin Hoodie, and tried to convince me to knit his next Purim costume. However, the lack of space in our suitcases (to say nothing of the prices; that alpaca yarn was $34 for 100 gm) forced me to decide that I could only buy one skein. The colours available were all so gorgeous that it was clear that I would have to come back with a ball of the ribbon yarn in order to match the colours.

Monday was a quiet day, as we were a bit exhausted from walking back and forth twice in two days, but on Tuesday the boys and I had a lot of fun: first of all, after a safety review on the docks, we were allowed to look at plankton that ADC had helped collect with the invertebrate embryology course. It was really fascinating, seeing all the tiny shiny balls that are actually real animals. After lunch, we walked into town, and while I went back to the yarn shop with the ball I wanted to match, the boys went geocaching. I will let A tell you all about that, and just say that buying yarn was even more fun than just looking.

eumelia also decided that she preferred colourful fingering-weight yarn to thicker alpaca, and I bought six mini-balls for her, and one large hank for myself, in a colour called Black Cherry. With excellent timing, the boys arrived just as I had decided what I wanted, and they were able to watch the hank being wound into a centre-pull ball. Not only did they enjoy watching that, they were relieved to hear that now they would not have to help me do the winding by hand :-) On the way home, we went past a second-hand bookshop that claimed to have 50,000 books and a computerised catalogue. Interestingly, the boys were not that keen - they preferred the new book shop we had gone to on Sunday. I think they lack the formative experience of second-hand bookshops being the only way to get books in English at a reasonable price. We are planning to visit what is supposed to be the biggest second-hand bookshop in North America, Powell's in Portland, on our road trip, so maybe that will help change their minds.

On Wednesday, the highlight of the day was the ice cream social at the dining hall, where you could have all the ice-cream you wanted, with all kinds of toppings, while on Thursday, the highlight was the farewell party for the invertebrate embryology course where ADC had given two talks. A helped grill (on a gas grill), and a good time was had by all. On Friday, we finally got on the water, and when for a brief practise row in the immediate vicinity of the labs, which are across the bay from the town of Friday Harbor. It was a bit nerve-racking at first, and S in the bow and me at the stern was the wrong way around for balance (and I got very wet from the rowers), but all in all, ADC and A gained enough confidence to row all the way across this morning. It is indeed quicker than walking, just under half an hour rather than slightly over 45 minutes.

We started a bit later than we had intended, so instead of beginning at the Whale Museum and continuing to the farmers' market, we started at the farmers' market, went to the San Juan Cheese Shop and ended up at the San Juan Island Museum of Art - the Whale Museum will have to wait for another day. I had wanted to go to the SJIMA from the moment I saw an advertisement for one of the exhibitions there: a photographer at the Whiteley Centre (where ADC has his fellowship now) had taken pictures of the invertebrates studied at FHL and printed them on blank backgrounds - they looked absolutely gorgeous. My favourite was the stalk jelly, which looked like something from a kaleidoscope. A liked the curly-headed spaghetti worm, which he believes proves the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. S's favourite was two starfishes touching each other, which he thought reminiscent of the Creation of Man from the Sistine Chapel. ADC refused to say which picture he liked best, claiming to be used to the animals.

After getting home, we went out again in the late afternoon, very kindly being lent a car by one of our neighbours, who is teaching at the marine invertebrates course, and drove off to explore some of the south coast of the island, via geocaching. We also took the time to watch the tide coming in, as high tide was at 5:45. I will now quote A on geocaching:
Geocaches are small caches hidden on trails in various places. The person hiding the cache opens a cache page on a geocaching website with the coordinates for the cache and a brief description of the cache and hints how to find it. If you want to go geocaching somewhere you search the websites for caches in that place and choose caches that look interesting and send their coordinates to your GPS. When you make sure the coordinates are on your GPS you can go to the place you are going geocaching and start looking for the cache. The caches are usually small boxes hidden somewhere not obvious but findable after a search. Once you find the cache you open it and see what’s inside. Common things found in caches are marbles, stickers and travel bugs*. In every cache there are a few pieces of paper for writing your name and the date you found the cache. Once you sign the cache you leave something in the cache and take one of the things in side of the cache. When you get back home you log your visit and write you found the cache (or didn’t).
*Travel bugs are small discs with a code you move from place to place and write on the website where it was moved and then you can track its trip.

My personal experience of geocaching is very fun and extremely fulfilling. it’s a very enjoyable extra to add to every hike. It was very exciting to find my first geocache with Shaul. While Mummy was in her knitting shop S and I went to look for an interesting geocache called “Quick Trail!”. We followed the directions in the description and what the GPS said was the right direction (it’s not a GPS like waze but a GPS for geocaching and tracking where you went and it has a compass and stuff) until we reached the middle of a short trail between two streets. After about 20 minutes of searching and S trying to persuade me the cache wasn’t there we found it between the bushes next to a broken cinder block (like the description said). When we opened the cache we signed our names, took a marble and put in a travel bug from a previous cache we didn’t actually find but just asked the people at the reception counter after looking for it outside and they pulled it out from under the table, so that’s not a real find after looking. S and I were very happy after finding “Quick Trail!” and kept talking about it until the end of the day.