Sol Duc River at Kloshe Nanitch – Post 9 of our August Seattle trip

After driving halfway around the peninsula, we needed a break. We saw this trailhead on the map, and it was just off the highway. We figured it would be a good place to stretch our legs and maybe have a little picnic. It turned out to be far prettier than we imagined.

We got home quite late that evening, but it was a great day on the peninsula!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Beach 3 – Post 8 of our August Seattle trip

Time to go to the beach! There are closer beaches, but I wanted to go to Beach 1, 2, 3 or 4. Those are the most boring names possible for a few of the most beautiful and remote beaches on the west coast (excluding Alaska).

The hike down to the beach was beautiful.

The weather was typical for Washington beaches. At first we hoped the fog might burn off, but it never did while we were there.

These guys are surf fishing.

Here’s how you dress for the beach in Washington, even in August.

Bare legs because – it’s the beach! And as many warm things on top as possible because – it’s cold! And if your ears are sensitive, you’ll need something over them to block the cold wet wind.

After we got away from the fishermen, we were able to let Biska off the leash. She was just a streak on the beach.

Tide pools!

After our hike on the beach, we drove the rest of the way around the peninsula. I can’t remember why that seemed like a good idea. It turned out to be longer than we had anticipated!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Getting my steps in – Post 7 of our August Seattle trip

The Fauntleroy ferry terminal is right next to a large beautiful park named Lincoln Park. It’s a forested park right on the water. I can’t believe we have both the Fauntleroy park and the Lincoln Park within walking distance.

After we got off the ferry, we decided to walk in Lincoln Park.

After walking along the water, we headed into the forest.

I took photos of the stairs for my exercise group. I have an exercise accountability group where we text each other about how much we’re exercising. We don’t actually exercise together, we just text each other our progress. It’s fun and encouraging. Let me know if you want to be part of that and I can add you. It’s just a group text, so you can join from wherever you are.

Lots of steps!

The thimble berries are ripe, but the blackberries mostly aren’t yet.

There’s a few ripe blackberries in the more sunny spots.

There should be a lot of blackberries ripe by the end of the month.

After we walked around at Lincoln Park we walked back up the hill to our place. These are the Thistle Street Stairs that take you straight up through the residential area. They start out gradually enough.

But then there’s more…

And more…

And more…

And then it gets downright steep…

OMG, when will it end?

Pretty crazy right? Yeah, I got my steps in!

Just when I thought I was done, we had more steps – this time going down.

It’s a challenge, but it’s such a beautiful neighborhood.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Forests and Ferries – Post 6 of our August Seattle trip

John loves ferries. He’s been joyriding them, every day since we got here. Luckily it’s only $5 to get from Fauntleroy, where we are staying, to Vashon Island and back. Everyone else in Seattle plops down $5 every morning for coffee; John goes and rides the ferry.

Our first morning I just wanted to rest from our travels, so John took Biska and rode the ferry himself. Some kind stranger took this picture:

Biska is completely comfortable on the ferry.

That afternoon we walked to the amazing Fauntleroy park, just a couple of blocks from where we’re staying.

The next morning – yep, the ferry again. This time I agreed to go.

We just walked on – it’s easier than taking a car on. Sometimes the wait can be quite long for the vehicles.

And we’re off!

Typical Seattle weather.

Here we are approaching Vashon Island.

The dock lowers to the level of the ferry and they cleat (attach) the ferry to the dock with lines (ropes) just like any other boat.

The bicyclists and pedestrians disembark first, then the cars.

Vashon Island is rural-residential, with only one café down by the terminal.

We walked uphill past all the cars waiting to get onto the next ferry. They waited in a single, snaking line that disappeared up the hill. We turned onto a side street to continue our walk, and passed a woman hurrying down the hill. She greeted us with a playful, “Why is the ferry never late when you are?”

We laughed agreeably and then looked at each other. What ferry is she late for? There’s only one. John checked the schedule and realized he had read it wrong. We needed to be scurrying back down that hill ourselves!

John set off on a trot. He said if we missed this ferry, we’d be stuck for two and a half hours. I wouldn’t have minded. I had noticed that the café was open, and we hadn’t had breakfast yet. I could totally sit at a café and eat breakfast by the water for two and a half hours. No problem! But John wanted to catch the ferry.

As we hoofed it down the hill, they started loading the cars. The loading process takes awhile, so we hoped that would give us time. They load pedestrians first, but we figured they would let the late pedestrians on at the end after the cars were loaded. And that’s what they did. They let us few stragglers board after the cars were all loaded.

And off we went!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Seattle! – Post 5 of our August Seattle trip

Our airbnb is excellent. It’s a walk-out basement apartment and I was worried it would be dark, dank and mildewy. But it’s not! Which is actually rather amazing because in Seattle, basements are commonly mildewy and residents just get so used to it that they don’t even smell it anymore. It’s not dark either, mostly because the owners have provided tons of lights with strong bulbs. Also the side that is at ground level gets the west sun in the afternoon.

But the best thing about it is – the absolutely amazing backyard with flowers everywhere!

The backyard is shared with the owners, who live in the main house above us. They’re super nice and we enjoy talking with them. The yellow building is a cute little garden shed. Behind that is the alley between this backyard and the backyards of the houses on the next street down. The alley turns out to be a natural congregation spot as people walk their dogs and work on their cars. We’ve already met a couple of the neighbors, who have been very welcoming and don’t appear to mind that we’re airbnb guests.

We also have a little covered patio space outside our front door that’s private and looks out onto the rest of the garden.

The airbnb is full of handy and fun things – our landlords “thought of everything” and then some! All sorts of little this’s-and-thats. It’s very different from our Boise airbnb which was crisp, clean, new and minimalistic. This one is cozy and lived-in. But still quite clean, which is really important to me.

The neighborhood is an expensive area in the hills right above the Puget Sound in west Seattle, with lots of ultra-cool cafés with artisanal and locally-sourced organic foods in biodegradable packaging. Our hosts stocked our kitchen with fancy little packets of expensive coffees and chocolates and locally made jams and crackers and cheese.

Every single thing we’ve eaten has been fantastic.

Coffee is one of Seattle’s primary pastimes, and sure enough, the kitchen is stocked to meet the needs of any and all coffee drinkers. There’s an electric coffee grinder, a French press, a drip coffee maker, a Keurig, an electric teapot, a stove teapot, various types of filters and several different kinds of coffee (but no decaf…they don’t drink much decaf in Seattle. The winter here is brutally dark, dreary and depressing and people get in the habit of drinking caffeinated coffee all day long just to stay sane).

But this is August! The rains have mostly stopped for one or two brief months. Seattle in August is glorious.

The garden is amazing.

This is the back of the house. The lower windows are our unit, and our front door is under that porch. This is just classic Seattle.

The porch has a hot tub on it, which we can use, by the way, although we haven’t yet. We’re still on mountain time and it stays light so late this far north, we’re having trouble staying awake past dark, lol. We did manage to stay up to see the sunset. We can’t quite see it from our place (our landlords can from the upper stories of the house, but we’re too low). But there are fantastic views from the neighborhood a half a block away.

The location is fantastic; within walking distance of several excellent cafés, two amazing forested parks with trails, and a ferry terminal. All within a few blocks of here.

I think we really got a good deal on this place. The rent is quite reasonable, just a tad more than one of our rentals goes for in Albuquerque. It’s smaller, of course, and not a detached home. But still! West Seattle! I already want to come back next year.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Seattle Trip – Day 4 – Rest day in Boise

Don’t worry, I’m not going to post every day. You’d get bored and I wouldn’t have time to do anything fun to post about! Once we get settled in Seattle, I’m sure my posts will decrease. But as long as we’re doing so much driving, I have time to write while John drives.

We arrived in Boise on Saturday and spent two nights. Here’s photos from our visit on Sunday.

Callan:

Chirstina:

Kira:

Basil:

Lol, the joke in our family is I can’t keep basil alive for more than a week. Chirstina seems to have figured out the trick. That is one unbelievably dang healthy basil plant. I figured it rated a spot in the family photos.

While John got some handyman fixes done and cooked lunch on the grill, I pruned all their overgrown bushes. We saved a few branches from the pruning for flower arrangements.

I cut off a massive amount of overgrowth. I filled their green waste bin plus a second huge bag, ready to go out the next week. All this in the 100 degree heat! Luckily Callan has air conditioning, and in fact keeps the house very cold. I would hang out inside until I was shivering (which didn’t take long), and then I was grateful to head back outside to prune some more in the heat.

We are super happy that Biska and Kira now get along.

The first time Kira and Biska were together, last fall during our rather horrendous Boise Roommate Saga, Biska was just a little puppy and had no manners. Biska would launch herself at Kira, wanting to play. Kira would growl and snap, but Biska would not take a hint. Biska didn’t mean any harm, but she was tormenting Kira, so we had to keep them apart. It was a huge nuisance. So we were greatly relieved to see that they get along now that Biska is older and better socialized.

In Tucson we take Biska to a home-based doggie daycare in the country to the east of us. She goes for half a day, once a week. The owner, Tally, is a dog trainer, so it’s more than just doggie daycare, its dog socialization training. It has been enormously helpful. Biska is friendly, confident, and considerate with other dogs now.

Next stop – Seattle!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Seattle Trip – Day 3 – Boise at last

By morning I had a sore throat. Was it from the air conditioning blowing a few inches from my face, or did I contract covid? We’re supposed to be visiting the kids today! We spent last night in Twin Falls, only two hours out of Boise, where Callan and Chirstina live. I’ve been really looking forward to hanging out with them. Was I going to have to quarantine instead? And does it count as quarantining if I stay “home” at our airbnb? Or do we need to turn around and drive home? Home being, I suppose, Albuquerque?

Have I recently been exposed to covid? The truth is, well, sort of probably. It seems like everyone has been getting exposed recently. My contractor’s son had symptoms last week, but hadn’t actually tested positive last time I heard. I didn’t interact with his son, just the contractor himself, who didn’t have any symptoms. It’s only a tenuous connection and right now, covid is so widespread that at any point any of us are likely interacting with someone who has recently interacted with someone with covid. 

Covid seems so common right now. I guess the only reason that it’s not a big deal on the news is because it’s mostly not deathly anymore? And everyone is bored with reading about it. Plus, I don’t think anyone has any idea how widespread it is anymore, because we’re all just testing at home and treating at home. I don’t know if anyone is reporting their positive tests.

So was I sick or not? We decided to hang out at the campsite for a bit this morning to see how I’m doing. We’re only two hours from Boise and can’t check into our airbnb until 2 pm. We had assumed we would hang out in Callan and Chirstina’s house, but not if I’m sick. Normally we’d be happy to hang around outside in a park, but today’s forecasted high is 105º. Pretty nuts for Boise. Our van’s portable air conditioner can’t keep up with temperatures that high.

Luckily we have covid test kits with us so we don’t even have to drive into town to look for one. That’s the advantage of being a heavy packer! True, it’s a nuisance to have to drag tons of potentially unnecessary luggage around, but when we want something, I’m likely to have packed it. Actually both John and I had packed test kits.

I opened a test and jammed that stick as far up into my sinuses as I could stand, and twirled for a count of 15, ugh, and…now we’re waiting 15 minutes…and drum roll…it is…negative! Whew! I know those home tests aren’t much good, but I’m feeling fine now too. My throat is fine. I guess I was just snoring last night and got all dried out! Lol.

Time to see the kids! We arrived in time for lunch. We told the Callan and Chirstina we’d bring take-out. John was in favor of just grabbing some breakfast burritos, but I had spotted a Russian restaurant that sounded interesting. Plus, I didn’t have covid so it was time to celebrate!

The restaurant was closed the next day, so today was our only chance. John and I tend to prefer to eat our main meal in the middle of the day and eat lightly in the evening. Russian food isn’t light, so I voted for Russian food for lunch. We got a number of items and it turned out to be fairly expensive, but we had been eating bread and cheese (and Greek fast-food) for two days. Plus, we planned to cook our own barbecue at Callan’s house for the next day, so we went ahead and splurged. It was yummy and the kids really appreciated it.

The Callan and Chirstina have a roommate (a good one this time) in the downstairs bedroom, and the guest room is set up as the kids’ office, and the guest bathroom has been taken over by their two new cats. So John and I stayed in an airbnb. It’s such an excellent airbnb! I want to stay here every time I come to Boise!

There’s a café right outside our front door, and the river is about 10 steps away. The greenbelt trail goes right by our windows, so we can watch the bicyclists, walkers, rollerbladers, strollers, dog walkers, and everyone passing by. 

Here’s the views out the windows:

And here’s the view from the front steps. This whole area is newly revitalized.

There’s no cars allowed down here at all – it’s all pedestrian and bikes. But there was a place to park the van on the backside of the building reserved just for us. It was a tight squeeze but we fit.

That’s the river right there.

The airbnb apartment is brand new inside. It’s rare to find a new, centrally located airbnb that allows dogs. I brought two large flat sheets to drape over the bed and the couch to keep Biska from shedding all over, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to keep that dog off the furniture. 

It’s a good thing we brought the sheets because, yep, puppy prints.

Biska unexpectedly walked right into the river on our first walk. I don’t know what she was expecting, but a deep river with a strong current obviously wasn’t it. She was more surprised than we were. Luckily John was able to hold onto her leash and get her back out.

Once she was wet, she was a dirt magnet. We tried to keep her out of the dirt but of course she got muddy. When we got back, John wiped her paws off with a towel at the front door, but it didn’t really do the trick. She got her feet the rest of the way clean on the bed, lol.

Here’s a picture of Biska right before she jumped into the river:

And after:

Yep, we’re going to have some muddy paws!

Here’s more pictures from our walk:

Saturday night with a live band along the riverfront!

We stopped to watch the paddlers in the water. Some were on boards and some were in kayaks.

Our airbnb was pretty in the evening light.

Our unit is on the ground floor on the corner. It’s very small, only a studio, but brand new and in such a fun location.

We could sit right on our front steps and watch everyone go by on the bike path.

Right at the water’s edge!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Seattle Trip – Day 2 – Still heading towards Boise

Day two went waaaay better than day one. Morning arrived sunny and beautiful.

It was a nice campsite, tucked into the trees. I was sorry to have to immediately leave our pretty campsite that we had not had time to enjoy the previous evening, having arrived far too late.

There were several trails in the area and it would have been nice to go for a hike. But we had another 7 hours of driving to our campsite in Idaho. So we made coffee, went for a quick walk around the campground, packed up and headed out.

We made a mental note to come back someday. It looked like a great area. The only downside was no cell reception, which is a common issue in southern Utah. 

As we drove up towards Salt Lake City, I took several photos of these mountains.

We couldn’t figure it out – is that snow or white rock? It’s July and 100 degrees out, but I remember being snowed on in the mountains just east of Salt Lake in July several years ago, even though it was very hot down in the valley. It’s all about elevation! In the end though, we decided it was probably white rock. We definitely want to come back and check it out someday.

For lunch we bought Greek take-out and ate at a park. Actually, weirdly, the park we had identified on the map was closed, so we ate in the shade of a tree on the edge of a grassy drainage basin right outside the park. Looks like a park to me!

In case you’re wondering, that loop around Biska’s nose keeps her calm and keeps her from pulling my arm off in excitement when we walk. It’s called a “gentle leader” and if you have a dog who pulls too hard on walks, I greatly recommend it. It’s not tight and doesn’t hurt her at all. It’s not a muzzle, and no, she doesn’t bite. She is just very exuberantly happy about life! She wants to run up to and interact with every bird, person, dog, child, squirrel, and anything that moves! At least she’s not timid, right?

That evening’s campsite was in a county park along a creek right outside of Twin Falls.

We arrived at 6 pm instead of 9 pm. What a difference three hours made! I did astoundingly better. Instead of a nightmarish never-ending drive in the dark, I wasn’t even tired yet. So I arrived cheerful and ready to see the sights. We had time for a walk, a leisurely dinner of Greek leftovers from lunch, and then another walk.

The park had a paved walking path that went on for at least a couple of miles along a creek.

One section of the path included a challenging frisbee golf course.

John especially wanted me to take a picture of this waterfall, but I have a true Oregonian’s disdain for small, unimpressive, unphotogenic dribbles of falling water. So John took the photo. It’s a nice photo, and there’s a waterfall there if you look closely.

It had been very hot and dry, but right around bedtime the evening mosquitos suddenly appeared in droves and chased us back to our van.

It was still very hot, so we started up our air conditioner. The van has two air conditioners. We have the regular air conditioner that most vehicles have, which only runs when the engine is running. We’ve also installed a small portable unit. It actually takes up quite a lot of space under our sink, but it is very much worth it.

The point of our portable unit is we can run it off electricity from the campsite plug without having to run our engine. We could even run it off our own solar generated power, but probably not for long before it drained our set of RV batteries we have installed in a row under our bunk. We can run it indefinitely if we have a source of electricity. Our campsite came with an electrical outlet, so we decided to leave the AC running all night. The way it’s designed, the fan runs continuously regardless of whether it’s cooling or not. We turned it the fan down to it’s lowest setting for the night, but it was still a lot of airflow in such a small space.

In the middle of the night I realized I had a sore throat. I figured it was probably due to the constant blowing of the air conditioner only 4 feet from my face. I considered turning it off, but didn’t know what the outside temps were doing. The daytime temps were well into the 100’s, so the outside temps could be in the 80’s. I was too asleep to figure it out, so I just left it running.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Seattle Trip – Day 1 – Heading towards Boise

I am sorry to post two grumpy posts in a row, but our first day of vacation wasn’t any easier than the last few days leading up to it! The first travel day is never a relaxing day.

We were slow to leave because it turned out John had more remodel prep work he wanted to do. I had thought that we just had one last box to pack of last minute items we were still using. But he didn’t want construction dust and general wear and tear on our furniture and possessions, so he was hurriedly wrapping many items in plastic. You can buy big rolls of plastic in the moving sections of Home Depot and Lowes specifically for that purpose, it’s sort of like mega-sized saran wrap. I understand his logic, but the plastic wrapping is not something I’d choose to do if I were in charge, and something about it bugs me irrationally, lol.

Yeah, the houseplants are in Tucson. No, they can’t survive an entire month without water. I’m hoping our remodel contractor, Neil, can water them once or twice while we’re gone.

My poor house, all packed up!

Finally we were ready to leave. We hadn’t even managed to get out of Tucson before we came upon a traffic accident. Never a good omen.

Plus, did you see those gray skies? Yep, by the time we had reached Phoenix, the weather had turned awful. In the summer the desert can get some fairly extreme weather – high winds and brief, torrential rainfall. It will dump buckets in a very short time, reducing visibility to near zero and flooding the roads. The water can’t run off as fast as it’s coming down.

We got lucky and found a sunny park for a quick lunch of bread and cheese. At least Biska was doing fine. She is a great traveler!

As we continued on through Las Vegas, our phones were showing a 2-hour delay on the freeway between Las Vegas and St. George, UT. It was actually two different back-to-back delays, one of about half hour and followed by another of about an hour and a half.

It was already late in the afternoon and at that point, my vote would have been to get a hotel and try again the next morning. But John is an optimistic person and he also tends to want to stick to the plan. I like plans too, but I’m more of a Plan B and C sort of person. I was tired.

But he had a couple of good points. First, it wasn’t going to hurt us any to sit in traffic. We have everything we need accessible in the van. Secondly, phone data isn’t always reliable, so maybe it had cleared. It appeared to be clearing, we thought, hopefully.

So we crept along in stop and go traffic for two hours. The first slow up turned out to be a fairly severe accident. Someone in a small car had rear-ended a semi-truck. Looking at the damage of the car, it was hard for me to imagine that the person could have survived. I found it upsetting and did not take a picture of that one. Next we came to the road construction that had caused the slow-up and the accident. 

By the time we got through all that, it was early evening. Again my vote was to stay in a hotel in St. George. But we had reservations at a campground just an hour up the road, and John wanted to press on. He didn’t want to have to mess around with finding a hotel, unloading our van, etc. We were so close – we just had one more hour to drive!

The road through the canyon into the mountains north out of St. George is surprisingly twisty. The van was being blown around by very strong winds, and pummeled by thundershowers. Soon it was dark. The combination of dark and twisty and windy and downpours at 80 miles an hour was terrible! I tried to lose myself in my kindle book, but that wasn’t helping.

For some reason I had accidentally downloaded one of those psychological thriller books, complete with a psychopath killer and unreliable narrators. It wasn’t the kind of book I needed right then. But our cell reception (and my patience level) wasn’t good enough for me to want to try to find something else.

We had reservations at a private campground with limited check-in hours. It started to look like we weren’t going to make check-in. The instructions said to call if we were going to be past 9:00 pm, so I called. The guy was grumpy about the weather and seemed to suggest that we shouldn’t even bother to come. He called his own campground “a big mud pit”. Well, that wasn’t encouraging.

Plus, they closed at 10:00 pm. Would we even make it by 10? Turns out just barely – we arrived at 9:40! That’s cutting it tight. It was pitch dark and silent. Luckily we drive a small van and not a big rig. But our back-up camera doesn’t work in the dark, particularly with bikes on the bike rack on the back of the van. I had to get out and direct John as he backed up based solely on my feedback, completely blind in the night.

After we got situated for the night, John generously took the dog for a walk, but I didn’t even leave the van after we got it parked. It was past bedtime and it had been a hard day.

As we drifted off to sleep we were suddenly jolted awake by the long and agonizing cry of a squirrel or other small mammal in fear for its life. Then something small clunked against the van. I don’t know if the clunk was the fleeing animal or a somewhat larger animal that must have been chasing it. I don’t know the outcome of that drama, but it did not set a relaxing tone for my dreams.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.