Monday, June 12, 2017

Brown’s Bay, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

When I last wrote, we were about to part with Diana and Greg.  They headed for Indiana, where they stay at our house, and will spend a month visiting friends and grandkids (and maybe their kids.)  Steve and I headed for the Seattle airport, where he flew to an amateur radio conference in Ohio, while I went to Plano, TX for some time with Natasha and her family.  (I got the better deal.)

Here’s a picture of Mike and Maria at an event at Maria’s daycare.

We had parked the rig in Issaquah, WA, which was about as close as we could get to the Seattle airport.  It is also where two of our “kids”, Kent and Bethany, live.  After we came back from our trips, we had dinner with them.  We really enjoy it when we get the chance to visit with friends on our trips.  It gives us some one-on-one time we normally wouldn’t get.

Kent and Bethany told us her brothers were flying in for the weekend (Memorial Day) and they were going to do some exploring.  We were able to meet the boys (Kent, Andy and Jeremy) at Ruby Beach that Friday.  Bethany was the only disciplined one of the bunch and she stayed home and worked. 

Ruby Beach was the second stop on our tour of the Olympic Peninsula.  We spent a couple of days at Ocean Shores.  Ocean Shores was one of the hot spots in the 50’s.  Pat Boone had a golf classic here and the Ocean Shores Inn drew all kinds of celebrities.  The Inn has been replaced and now it’s just a nice ocean side town.  We were there right before Memorial Day and the staff in the grocery store was not anticipating the weekend rush with joy.

Our campsite had an ocean view and we took it easy with a few walks, lunch out and a visit to the local museum.  Deer were plentiful and we saw them frequently on our trips to town.  They left tracks in the RV park, too.  My view:

From Ruby Beach, we went up to Forks to an RV park.  We drove down to La Push for a late lunch at the River View Restaurant.  We could see the river and a just a bit of the far bank, but it was pretty well fogged in.

One of the things we keep learning on our trips is that it pays to get there early.  And since this was a holiday weekend, we headed for the Hoh Rain Forest early the next day (Saturday).  It was about an hour drive, heading back into the interior of the Olympic National Park.

As Jeremy pointed out on our walk down to Ruby Beach, this place seems like another world, certainly to those of us from the Midwest.  The rain forest was even more so.  The trees here make me think of the forests on Endor, (land of the Ewoks, Star Wars, Episode 6), except that the trees are too close together to fly the speeders through.

We did two trails (short ones).  At one point, we stopped because I realized I was hearing an unusual number of birds.  We listened for a few minutes and then went on.  While we heard a few more birds, nothing like that short section.

And we found a celebrity touring the rain forest:

The last trail led down to the river, a glacial river like we saw in New Zealand, Alaska and Canada.  The water is silvery and opaque, filled with suspended glacier dust.  The dust is created when the glacier slowly grinds down the rocks as it moves down the mountain.  The dust is carried into the river by the melting glacier.

We left the rain forest shortly after lunchtime.  The parking lot was full and cars were parked along both sides of the road for quite awhile.  Then we got to the entrance and cars were backed up at least a half mile beyond waiting to get it.

Go early.  And I speak as one who loves to sleep in.

The next day was cold and dreary and we stayed in and worked on stuff that needed to be done.   Steve concentrated on his radio stuff and I did some sewing.  I sewed a curtain for our door, as the door window is directly opposite the thermostat and the bright light throws off our heating and cooling.  It took me most of 3 years to figure out how to attach a curtain, as the door is metal and the screen door is attached to it.  But Steve installed a second screen door handle/cross bar at a height corresponding to the top of the window and I made a curtain we could button over it.  I made the curtain out of a hand towel, so it would totally block the light.  It seems to be working nicely.

We went back to the River View Restaurant for dinner that night and saw the view without the fog. 

Quite different.  And then we were joined for most of the meal by a bald eagle sitting out on the pier.  That doesn’t happen every day!

We then moved from the east side of the peninsula to the north side, to visit Hurricane Ridge, which is named because hurricane strength winds pound it in the winter.  Snow still kept most of the trails closed and the one we took had a good sized patch we had to walk through. 

The view was amazing!

And Steve got a good picture of the black tail deer we’ve seen throughout the Olympic Penisula.

And then we had our first possible disaster.  We pulled out of the RV park the next morning, headed for the ferry to take us back near Bellingham.  We weren’t even a mile down the road when a fellow motorist frantically waved us off the road.  The passenger side tires on the trailer were trailing black smoke.  They were actually touching.  After several phone calls and a visit from two tow truck drivers, it was determined that we had broken a spring.  Somehow they got it fixed enough that we could drive to a repair shop.  The repair shop put us at the top of their list and got us on our way.

We have a tire monitoring system that would have alerted us to a problem eventually, but are very thankful for the motorist who flagged us down.  Who knows how much damage we would have sustained if he hadn’t stopped us.

So we canceled our early morning ferry and took one that afternoon.  We camped north of Bellingham for two nights, getting the bearings on the trailer wheel bearings lubricated and an oil change for the truck.  We then caught the ferry to Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Island has been amazing.  Butchart Gardens near Victoria was amazing as always.  And knowing my love of waterside campsites, Steve found two in a row that have been extra special.  The first, just north of Victoria, was difficult to find and to get to.  But we sat about 50 feet from the water at low tide.  But the icing on the cake was the mountain views.  We could see the Cascade Mountain range, including Mt. Baker, near Bellingham, and the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. 

Sea gulls, a heron, seals, and a bald eagle visited while we were there.

We spent a day at Butchart Gardens, enjoying the spring flowers along with a few early roses.  We also took a 45 minute boat trip that promised more than it delivered in the way of wild life, but we did get to see a star fish in the wild and another bald eagle.

Flowers at Butchart Gardens:

Night at our Victoria campground:

I was disappointed to leave Victoria, as there aren’t too many campsites that

provide both water and mountain views, but Steve had us booked into a campground in Parksville.  He thought we would have an ocean view and he was right.  And we can see snow covered mountains on the Canadian mainland.  I was just missing the wildlife.

But surprisingly, we had the same wildlife.  A heron liked to hang out on our bit of shore after dinner and the seagulls and seals both dined in the shallow water below us.  And while I don’t think there was a nest, there was a bald eagle who spent a lot of time in the tree next to us.  As a result, we got to see him fly by our window several times.  They are gorgeous in flight.

Our heron:

One of the seals:

(As I was writing this, two eagles appeared, one of them swooping down to catch something in the water.  They then disappeared, probably back to the nest to feed some young ones.)

We spent several days in Parksville and then headed across the mountains to the west side of Vancouver Island.  It’s the wild and wooly side.  Few roads and cities, but a national park reserve.  The information center was on the beach.

We visited another rain forest.  This one tends to suffer lots of damage from the winter winds so there are lots of trees that have been downed over the years. 

One was used for the floor of this bridge.  You can’t tell very well from the picture, but the bottom is one long log.

We did not have a beautiful view at our site on this side of the island, but our fire pit was quite nice.  Les, I think you need this at the farm.

Four nice logs around a fire cauldron.

We are now in Brown’s Bay, Vancouver Island.  Again, Steve found us an ocean front site.  We are looking across one of the narrow parts of the inside passage up the west coast of Canada.  There is a fair amount of traffic, including cruise ships.  This one passed last night.

This is way too long, but I’m now up to date!

Take care.

Deb

Saturday, June 3, 2017

On a ferry bound for Vancouver Island, Canada.

It’s a gray, chilly day, with occasional spits of rain.  But we are warm and cozy in a lounge on the top floor of the ferry.  By luck (and early arrival) we were one of the first rigs loaded on the ferry, so we’re comfortable inside while they get everyone else loaded.

Sorry it’s been so long since I posted, but we’ve been pretty busy.  We left Indiana on April 20th, 3 days later than we had hoped, so that cut 3 days out of our travel time to Bellingham, WA, to see Greg and Diana.  They were headed back to Indiana on May 9th and we wanted to spend some time with them.

Normally we follow the rule of 2’s: no more than 200 miles a day, at least 2 nights in any place we stop and cocktails by 2 pm.  We don’t drink, but the last item means that we’re set up and in place by 2, leaving most of the day for sightseeing, chores or relaxing.  But for the trip to Bellingham, we traveled up to 300 miles a day, 3 days in a row, and then took a day off.

I prefer the rule of 2’s, but we had a fun trip.  On our second night, we managed to meet up with a former roommate, Jeremy, who graduated with his master’s last spring and is now working for John Deere in Des Moines, Iowa.  We also got to admire his award for a patent, which is a lovely small sculpture that sits on his mantel.  (Jeremy is not the only one of our “kids” with a patent.  We have a talented bunch!)

The rest stop near Tiffin, Iowa had some unique features.  It was themed around books.  Quite lovely.

  

The landscape across the country varies quite a bit.  The first leg of our journey was flat fields and pastures, which morphed into rolling hills, where the road seemed lined with redbud trees.  We came around one curve and crossed a bridge into an area of hills that resembled a lumpy comforter, after Sophie and Baxter (our long ago dogs) had arranged it for a nap.

Later, we came through some hills and burst onto the Great Plains, an enormous flat area between Midwest hills and the Rocky Mountains.  It was easy to imagine a glacier moving slowly along, flattening everything in its path.

We took a short cut between two highways and were in the middle of nowhere on a two lane road.  It was fairly flat and very little traffic.  And, of course, no cell phone service. The towns were small enough that if you blinked, you really did miss them.  And cell phone service lasted about a minute.

But we saw a lot of prong horns along this route and maybe some wild horses.  Prong horns are related to antelope and look a bit like deer.

The highway we were on roughly followed the path of Lewis and Clark.  While there are farms and fences and the prairie grasses have been tamed, it’s still not hard to imagine them paddling their canoes on the streams that cross the prairie.  It takes a bit more imagination to see the thousands of buffalo that once roamed the area.  I’ve seen hundreds of buffalo together in Yellowstone National Park and that was pretty awe-inspiring.

The plaque below told of Sacajawea leading Captain Clark through the Bozeman Pass on their return east.  Note the snow in the background.  Luckily, there was no snow on the roads.

The rise into the Rockies was gradual and Steve didn’t really think we were there until I pointed out that the statue in Butte, Montana, of the Madonna of the Rockies was on the continental divide.  Then we were seriously in the mountains with some twisty roads and great views.

We stayed overnight in Wallace, Idaho, a small mountain town that mostly existed in a valley under the interstate.  Our camp for the night was an RV park run by the local brewpub.  They were a little confused when we didn’t order any beer with our dinner.   The town looks like it has successfully made the switch from mining town to tourist destination.

See the flying saucer on the corner in front of the Stardust Motel in the next photo:

The train station, now a museum.

The view out our back window:

When we hit the Cascade Mountains, which run down the western part of Washington, the road seemed to be lined with forsythia.  It turns out that it’s an invasive species called Scotch Broom. The naturalists don’t like it, but it made the drive through the mountains pretty.

We finally made it to Diana and Greg’s, where we kicked back and recovered from our “dash” across country.   Their house is the most relaxing place I know that’s not a massage table.  I kept falling asleep.

We celebrated our 44th wedding anniversary on May 6th with Diana and Greg and then watched the political news.  It was, as Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “Déjà vu all over again.”  44 years ago as we traveled on our honeymoon, we watched the Watergate hearings.  Life repeats itself.

Greg and Steve made several trips to Hardware Sales to get materials for various projects.  Diana and I went to get pedicures and talked a lot when I wasn’t sleeping.

This blog entry is getting way too long, so I’ll break off and try and get this posted.

I’ll try and post again soon!

Deb