I'm a little overdue on passing along some observations about our trip to the Pacific Northwest, which remains one of my favorite regions. Now that the Johanna episode has largely passed, here they are.
First and foremost, many thanks to John and Mary and Janet's brother John and Roseanna and especially Sean for looking after Johanna while we debated whether to end the trip early.
Our cousin Hope Dean. If you don't get yourself out to Anacortes and the San Juan Islands with Hope as your elaborately prepared guide and teacher, you are definitely missing out on one of life's great experiences. She booked a ferry, drove to the ferry, drove all over San Juan Island and showed us the place, packed a great lunch of local berries, which we ate overlooking a harbor, and took us to two great dinner places. While I wish we all lived closer, this was certainly an unmatched experience. Did you know? British and American garrisons stationed on different parts of San Juan Island once got into a war in which the only casualty was a pig.
Our Canadian friends Bob and Merrilyn Mason, who live on a farm about an hour east of Vancouver. We stayed there for three days, our first visit since they hosted us at the 2010 Olympics. One night we had turkey and the next steaks, all raised on the premises.
Janet's cousin Christine Robbins and her husband Ed, with whom we had dinner near her house in Olympia one evening.
As you can tell, I like traveling where you get to see cousins and friends you don't get to see all that often. We did the same in Texas last spring.
Ferries. I could go out to this region for two weeks and spend the whole time riding ferries around all the bays and islands. It's as beautiful as any region can get. We had spectacular weather, almost all sunny and pleasantly warm.
Food. One problem when you travel is the frequent difficulty of finding healthy food. Not in the Pacific Northwest with its ample supplies of salmon and halibut. Janet gets the prize for the quip of the trip, one evening at a seafood dinner: "You don't see much tilapia around here."
On our last two visits to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, we had delightful seafood dinners at a restaurant named Anthony's, which is a small chain of sorts. We had dinner at three of the restaurants in the area – Anacortes, with Hope, Olympia, with Christine, and the airport again.
Dickson family lore features another seafood restaurant named Ivar's Fish House. It's now a chain called Ivar's House Of Salmon. It gets pretty awful reviews. The only time we had anything at an Ivar's was waiting for a ferry: we got ice cream cones at an outdoor snack bar attached to the restaurant.
One reason for the plentiful supply of salmon is an extensive system of fish hatcheries. We visited one and it was fascinating; the salmon live for eighteen months to two years in tanks fed by water from the nearby stream before being released to go down to the ocean. Their sense of something like smell of the water brings them back to the same hatchery to spawn. While less than ten percent of naturally hatched salmon survive, ninety percent of those from the hatcheries survive.
Serendipity. Twice we decided to just drive out of our way into the mountains and got rewarded both times with stunning alpine panoramas. One drive to a high meadow (with plenty of snow still around) featured hair-raising hairpin turns with no guard rails. Janet just put her head in her lap.
Seattle. Great town, pretty compact to get around in. But homeless people abounded. And we had one miserable day trying to drive from Canada down to Olympia, through Seattle, which meant taking the only decent route, I-5, which was a parking lot. Six hours for a trip that was supposed to take three.
It was fun to reprise some of our old trip to the World's Fair. We rode the monorail out to the Space Needle. We went to the top. We saw perhaps the very finest movie I have ever seen, an IMAX production called The Flight Of The Butterflies, about the discovery that monarchs over the course of three generations every year, migrate to a remote part of Mexico and back, in what was the US Pavilion at that fair.
Despite Seattle's obvious prosperity, the region as a whole seems a bit down. In nearly every town of any size there are at least one and usually more than one (1) pawnshop, (2) payday loan shop and check cashing shop and (3) Goodwill store. For one memorable town, called Concrete for some reason not known to us, the most impressive thing was the elaborate and fancy sign at the town entrance, which belied the very downtrodden look of the place.
Driving around the Olympia Peninsula, we had decided to drive down to the Pacific coast and spend one night in a coastal town. At Cape Flattery, we saw a seal catch a fish and head for a cave to eat it. Farther down the coast, the area became fogged in. Over the course of five minutes driving from sun into fog, the thermometer on our rental car registered a drop of ten degrees; and then a rise of twelve degrees going back. Ocean Shores, the coastal town where we stayed, was a foggy, depressing town without a single decent restaurant.
Sometimes if seems as if airlines and car rental companies have a secret plan to make travel as supremely miserable and senseless as possible. It's too long to recount here why this trip reinforces this suspicion, but if it's true, they are doing a very fine job indeed.
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