Relaxing Days in Seattle

Huffing along on a power walk at 6:30 a.m. east on 155 Ave in Shoreline, WA at a rate of 3.3 MPH on these steep hills, that speed is hard to maintain.  Sweating like a pig (hmmm I wonder if pigs sweat and where did that expression get started?) up these hills, it is a lot different than a walk in Romeo, MI.  I’ve been getting in between 3 and 5 miles a day for the last several days getting ready for our clime on Mt Baker and Mt Rainier next week.  Although we will only go to the 8500 foot level of Mt. Baker and the 10500 foot level of Mt Rainier, the air at that height is thin and will take a lot out of Adrian and me.

I have been spending some time with my daughter and Rob staying in their house.  It’s relaxing.  The sky has been clear every day the temperature in the day a nice 75 degrees and 58 in the evening. 

Shoreline is a Seattle suburb where they moved to a couple of years ago and now they have decided to buy a house here and are going though the anguish of finding the right house and bidding at the right price.  This is the fourth house they have bid on and they have determined that if they stand any chance of getting it they need to bid $40K to $50K higher than the asking price.  The housing market is very strange here, it is a seller’s market and even then many investors, with cash on hand, are driving the locals out of the market because the demand for rental housing is so high they can ask for unreasonably high rents and they get it.  More importantly, homes that normally sell for $100K to $150 K in Michigan are selling here for $350K to $450K – it is an insane market.

Right now I am relaxing in the back yard with a beer and my laptop.  Rebeca has taken the kids to the movies and with my companion, Stela Artois from Belgium, I am having a wonderful and creative time.  And I just got a real treat.  I heard the humming birds feeding on the honeysuckle behind me, I sat perfectly still and the bird came and hovered right in front of my face for at least 15 seconds looking straight at me.  It was no more than 12 inches away and I'm glad I had my glasses on.

We went crabbing yesterday but forgot to bring the bait, so we spent some time at the pier in Everett, WA watching people fish.  They were catching all types of fish, the most impressive was the flounder.  One little girl about Adrian’s age go so excited with the star fish on the pier pilings that she dove in to get a couple.  Later we decided to take a ferry ride to Whidbey  Island – the kids loved it.  

 Adrian crabbing off some rocks

 A nice flounder

 On the Ferry

We stopped and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Everett, it seems that there is a Mexican restaurant every block.  I counted 15 in the drive on State Highway 99.  The Mexicans are making the Chinese look bad in this part of the country!

Today I took the kids to the Seattle Aquarium and we had a treat, they were feeding the Giant Pacific Octopus.  Boy I would hate to meet that critter in a dark alley.  The Aquarium is very popular because it’s like a petting zoo, you can touch the exhibits (except for the ones that eat you.  Seattle is very accessible, lots of parking on the street so you don’t have to get ripped off for parking.  Tomorrow will spend some time on the pier and do some crabbing.  Maybe we’ll get some Dungeness crabs for dinner.

Trip to the Pacific Northwest - The Cascades and Beyond

The Pacific Northwest

Most people think of the State of Washington as a rainy place characterized by the belief that it rains nonstop in Seattle between the end of September and the beginning of May and then it rains only every other day the rest of the year.  Well, not true!  At least not entirely true.  It does tend to rain a bit in the wintertime, but it is more of a mist, but it is better than below freezing temperatures and snow.  What most people do not realize is that the State of Washington has two extreme climate zones; the western “wet zone” characterized by the emerald green lush vegetation outlined by the Pacific and the Puget sound regions and the Eastern dry zone that seems to conveniently stop at the Idaho border.  In fact most people do not realize that next to death Valley, California, with an annual rainfall of about 6 inches per year, Eastern Washington is the driest place in the country with an annual rainfall of 7 inches per year!

 

 The Desert of Eastern Washington east of Spokane

We woke up in Spokane, WA as the train was leaving the station about 6:30 a.m. – it was running about an hour behind schedule – probably due to the heart attack episode back in Wisconsin.  It’s hard to characterize a city from the train that early in the morning, but from what I could tell, the center of the Inland Empire, as Spokane as known, has not changed much form the 1980s when we used to travel there.  There is a lot of desert farming in Eastern Washington using sprinkler irrigation.  When you fly over the area it seems like half the dessert is irrigated with these circular sprinkler systems forming circles of plantations that can be as big as a quarter mile in diameter.  Luckily, there is enough water in the northwest to handle all that, unlike states like Arizona where the water is so scarce.

One of the most impressive sites was the crossing the Columbia River - largest flowing river in the U.S.  Like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) controls the hydro power generation of this mighty river.  It looks huge at Wenatchee area but when the Snake joins it just south of the Tri-Cities in southern Easter Washington, it becomes enormous.  Adrian and I decided to have breakfast in the restaurant and we sat in a table with a fellow who have had his suitcase, with his insulin, stolen in Glacier.  It might have been a case where the lady to took it might have gotten he wrong suitcase.  With good reason, he was anxious to get to his destination and to his pharmacy for an additional supply.  

Crossing the Cascade mountains was an impressionable experience with its thick forests, rugged mountains and tall peaks with glaciers on the top providing the source for pristine rivers with water so clear it lured you to go and have a drink.  I could not take my eyes away from the scenery, in fact I doubt if I blinked the whole time.  The crossing is not as difficult as it used to be before 1929 when an 8-mile tunnel was built through the mountains.  The train used to wind up and down the mountainsides taking a day or more to get across.  The tunnel reduces the crossing to less than 20 minutes, but in complete darkness of a hole a mile below the surface above.  I thought about being trapped a mile below a mountain as we made our way through the dark hole.  We emerged on the western side of the range and we went from a non-populated area to a an area sprinkled with towns, farms and cities.

Then it happened, we have reached the Pacific Ocean (well, actually Puget Sound, but wants to quibble with details).  We could see the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountain range across the Sound and Seattle was only an hour away.  The tracks are on the coast from Everett to Seattle and we had a great treat with a seaside vista for the rest of the trip.   

My daughter, Rebeca, was waiting for us at the train station, and in a way, I hated for our trip to have to end.  The first and only condition for taking this type of train trip is not to be in a hurry.  It is the trip that counts, not getting there.  Of course, the experience is always improved if one has a sleeping compartment, not just for a more comfortable sleep, but you get priority in dining room seating.   

Trip to the Pacific Northwest - North Dakota and Montana

This is the second day of the trip through North Dakota and Montana.

North Dakota and Montana

I opened my eyes a 4:00a.m. as we are pulling out of Fargo, North Dakota. The train is so smooth and quiet that one does not feel the change in speed.  The train whistle, loud and annoying outside could not be heard inside.  Our seats turn into (semi) beds and sleeping was comfortable.  My daughter suggested bringing a light blanket and we took a couple of “snuggies” and sleeping in coach seats could not have been better.  Although the train was very quiet, about three or four seats behind us sat an overweight person with a sinus problem.  He not only snored, he could have won a competition for annoying noises against a large pride of lions growling at the same time.  There was a couple of times that he seemed to have stopped breathing and was about to die – no such luck.  I feel sorry for the person sitting next to him.  We did have an incident where someone must have had a heart attack in the car next to us.  “If there is a doctor on the train please come to car number six” was the announcement over the intercom that first indicated a sign of a problem.  The train stopped in the next town, an ambulance was waiting and they took him (or her) off the train.

At 6:22 a.m. we awaken to a beautiful sunrise near Rugby, ND. The scenery continued with vast farms, however, it seemed that soybeans and wheat were rapidly replacing corn as the farmers’ favorite crop. There were also a lot of cattle grazing at the distance. The landscape is absent of trees now but there are a few walls of poplar probably planted as wind breaks. The sky is clear I began to look for buffalo roaming and deer and antelope at play – after all we were heading West. 

It seems that all of the northern section of the State of North Dakota is flooded.  I was informed, by a “Dakotan” traveling on the train that there is no outlet for Devil Lake and it is flooding the northern part of the State, essentially on its way to becoming an inland sea. Crops cannot be planted and the railroad is being threatened. 

The rails parallel the Interstate and it's nice to be able to pass cars as if they were moving very slow. We must be moving at least 80 to 85 mph, a little less than the 110 mph we were doing in Michigan.  There is a lot of oil drilling going on in northwestern North Dakota. Oil drilling rigs everywhere as far as one can see from the train.  In support of the oil drilling, there was a lot of construction of supporting infrastructure such as small and large storage tanks, rail tracks to ship the oil and hundreds of new-looking rail oil tanker cars waiting to carry out the oil.  We also were beginning to see hilly land as we get closer to the Rockies, although they were still very far away from our location.

The Rockies could be seen at the distance rising from the plains by late afternoon.  I noticed also that there were hawks every 10 or so power line posts.  Probably the range of their territories and if they are like cardinals, they will not let other hawks in their territory to hunt.  The power line posts were the highest things around and they each claimed their perch watching for food and trespasser hawks.  As we traveled west we had another brief stop at Wolf Point and Shelby Montana, a couple of small towns that someone from a larger city would go insane if they had to live there.  But it was the perfect home for the locals.  

 Wolfpoint MT

 A brief stop at Shelby, MT

Traveling companions on their way to Glacier National Park

I got to see at a couple of antelope (at least they seem to antelope) feeding on what seemed to be a recently harvested field of wheat.  I also saw a couple of deer but in either case I could not get my camera in time to take the pictures.  I wanted to see deer and antelope play like the song “Home on the Range,” but I guess I had to be satisfied with dear and antelope feeding.

The train had a scheduled stop at Havre, Montana, we were a little hungry so I called ahead to Dominoes Pizza and had a large pizza delivered to the train as we made a brief stop. Apparently even the conductors were surprised that nobody had thought of that before.  I got a standing ovation from the passengers and crew.

 Our Pizza Order

We had a chance to talk to a lot of people both in the dinning car and in the observation car.  The topic of conversation after the “pizza stop” was two thunderstorms over the plains of Montana coming our way (or more precisely we were going their way).  It reminded me of the time I was driving through Montana one summer evening in the late 1970s.  There were two thunderstorms one on each side of the highway.  The only radio station I could get out there at 2:00 a.m. was a country-western station and it was playing Johnnie Cash singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”  The impressive part was the lightning on either side of the car that seemed to be synchronized with the music.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

 Two Thunderstorms over Montana

We got to Glacier National Park as the sun was setting. The picture below does not show the forest-covered mountains or the snow at the higher peaks because the light had faded very fast.  But it was a beautiful view.  I was lucky to have gotten to see the “amber waves of grain” and the “purple mountains majesty” rising from the plain.  I kept looking for buffalo but did not see any.

 "Amber Waves of Grain"

Approaching Glacier National park at sunset

It was slow going up the mountain and we couldn’t have been going more than 40 mph.  We got to east Glacier National Park at around midnight and half the people on the train got off – but not the one with the snoring problem.