Lodges, Sea and Mountains
You may remember, I am an Alaska girl. It goes deep. When we moved to Pensacola, my husband and I looked for a house on the water, which we found, and did not buy for a lot of really good reasons. One is that it showed signs of having been underwater at some time(s) and another was that the water here doesn’t do much. In Alaska, on the West coast, there are waves, and sometimes they are lovely huge crashing waves.
So one of the things I need to do to feed my soul is to get back to where I can be near mountains, and sea, and nights without a lot of ambient light, and scenes of sheer grandeur. We are all wired differently; I NEED this connection to restore my perspective on what matters, and what does not.
We started our journey out of Edmonds on the Edmonds ferry to Kingston, a ferry I have taken a lot in my life. Here is a map of our first day:
We stopped by the Edmonds bakery to get my Mom a maple bar. If you ever go to Edmonds, WA, the Edmonds Bakery is on Main Street, close to the roundabout, and has been making the best pies and pastries around for many years.
We said our goodbyes, and by the grace of God, made it to the ferry line just as it was boarding, no wait. It’s raining lightly but in Edmonds, teams are out playing soccer, couples are hiking around the hills of Edmonds, and the rain doesn’t stop normal activity, it is a part of normal.
The Edmonds Ferry
A rainy foggy day in Edmonds
I hate it when we are parking on a slant! They put blocks behind the wheels, but I have visions of the car just rolling right off.
That’s the Edmonds Ferry going from Kingston to Edmonds seen through the ferry car-carry area.
Someones fanciful house in Kingston
The dock in Kingston approaches
The Ferry system in Washington state is a part of the highway system. It’s how people living and working on the islands get gas and groceries and household goods. The ferries can hold a full sized moving van, and daily there are construction vans, electrical maintenance and highway maintenance vehicles traveling via ferry to remote destinations. It’s a part of life. Many people commute to the “mainland” from the islands for work, keeping a car on each side to reduce ferry costs (it’s a lot cheaper to walk on than to take a car on board).
When we planned this trip, I told AdventureMan “I don’t have any control over the weather. It might be rainy and cold the entire time.”
And AdventureMan grinned at me and said “I’ll bring books.”
He’s game.
I tried to take him to a wonderful restaurant on the Dungeness spit called The Three Crabs. We found Three Crabs Boulevard, but . . . no Three Crabs. It no longer exists.
We ended up at a small restaurant just outside of Port Angeles. We would have eaten in Port Angeles, but every restaurant we saw was a chain restaurant, and we were on a detour and had concerns about staying close enough to the road we needed to be on. As we left Port Angeles, we found the Fairmount, the kind of place we love to try, a local place, full of people still eating breakfast, or drinking coffee, or eating pie, but mostly checking on the latest local news.
AdventureMan wanted a hamburger. He said it was pretty good.
I had thought “Port Angeles! Fish!” and ordered halibut. This is frozen halibut; I could get this is Pensacola.
By this time, though, the skies have lifted and we are seeing some blue sky, which is really amazing, because we are in the Olympic Rain Forest. During the next couple of hours, on our way to Kalaloch Lodge, it must have alternated sun and rain, sometimes even heavy rain, fifteen or twenty times. We were just thankful it was not a steady dreary rain.
Along the way, we marveled at the trees. There were some very ferny kind of trees, and also some trees with lots and lots of moss on them.
We took a stretch break at Storm King Ranger Station, on Lake Crescent, where one of the funniest incidents on our trip happened. We were walking out on the dock and a group with two dogs were out there, and the dogs jumped in (they didn’t mind the cold water) and swam and swam, the happiest dogs you ever did see. As one was exiting the water, he stopped and pooped. His owner, a young woman, yelled “Oh no! Oh no!” She is waving her plastic poop bag (people are SO conscientious in the PNW) and goes on to wail “How am I going to scoop that poop out of the WATER??”
Well, I think sometimes you just have to leave well enough alone. Her earnest concern, her utter shame at not being able to recover that poop just totally cracked me up, even as I felt sympathy for her. “You can’t do anything about an act of God,” I laughed, “that’s just what dogs do.”
Mostly, I really wanted you to see the color of the Lake Crescent water. Isn’t it gorgeous?
Lost My Way :-)
Aren’t vacations great? I had such great plans; travel to all these fun spots AND read two books I have to have read by the time I get home AND do Trip Advisor reviews AND tell you about my trip on this blog.
Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha.
I managed to read one New Yorker on my flight from Atlanta to Portland.
I managed to blog in Portland.
I even managed an entry or two in Seattle, where we were spending time with my Mom, who had been hospitalized the previous month with a particularly nasty bout of influenza, suffered two subsequent rounds of pneumonia and a couple small strokes. She was in rehab, re-gaining her strength, and shortly after I left, she returned to her home. My Mama has some amazing resiliency. She is 94, and she still has all her marbles. I am learning a lot about what having great genes and living a long life can mean – it takes courage. Mom has that in spades.
Once AdventureMan and I got on the road, however, I just don’t know where the time went. Certainly, I didn’t MAKE room to keep up with the blogging. We usually landed where we were headed mid-afternoon, and would explore. Then I would take a look at the next day, and AdventureMan would take a look at the map and we would plot our course. Then . . . sometimes we would take a nap before dinner. Sometimes we might take a walk. And then, by the time we finished dinner, had figured our what we might need for the next day (for example, we each had a medium sized bag, but some places we stayed didn’t have elevators, so we would repack what we needed for that night in a smaller bag and tote that in, rather than tote everything.
In the Fred Meyer’s in Lynnwood, we had found a noodle, so if a hotel had a pool, we toted the noodle in, too. It’s cheap, and it really makes for good exercise, and at the end, you can put it in the recycle and maybe someone else can use it.
So sometimes we would also tote in the noodle.
We also had emergency supplies: a bag of Halo’s (small seedless tangerines), dark chocolate, rice crackers, a bag of peanut M&Ms for AdventureMan (even the smell of them makes me gag), ginger candy for me. Mostly that stayed in the back seat unless we were staying two days or there was no breakfast included.
We quickly discovered our rental car, a Nissan Altima, had no pick up at all. Going up the twisty turny roads on Highway 1 and California 1, the car would go slower and slower. It was like navigating an ocean going vessel. We love our agile little Rav 4’s. We joke that we are a Rav 16 family; between the four adults in Pensacola, we have four Rav 4s. It is agile and fuel efficient, and comfortable for long drives. The Altima . . . is not any of those things.
Please pardon the two week interruption while we voyaged. I will start to catch you up now, I promise.
O’Yeah, Tasty; First Meal in Seattle
A month ago I was in Seattle when my 94 year old mother suddenly came down with influenza and was hospitalized for 13 days, drifting into pneumonia twice, and suffering several small strokes. It was a difficult time, and as I was running errands for her one day, I passed a new Chinese restaurant near the hospital, O’Yeah Tasty, Szechuan cooking.
Szechuan. Near Edmonds Community College. Hope springs eternal, maybe I can get some really good Chinese food in the midst of all this emotional chaos!
(When we were moving to Pensacola several years ago, our son sat us down, looked at us very seriously and told us he had something to tell us we weren’t going to like. With a long face he stated “You need to know that there is not a GOOD Chinese restaurant in Pensacola.” We searched. We tried them all. Most were sort of Americanized Chinese, none had the good strong flavors we had become used to overseas. Longing for GOOD Chinese food is something we have grown used to experiencing.)
I had something called Mongolian Delights, recommended from the Chef’s specials by the cashier/order taker. It was fabulous, and the Hot and Sour soup I had with it was really HOT. When I told my sister on the phone where I was, she said Mom wanted some Hot and Sour soup, so I took some to her, and she ate it, claiming it was delicious. It was just about the only thing she ate that day. A day or two later, I ordered an old favorite, Chong Qing Spicy Chicken, and I almost cried when it arrived, it was so totally TASTY, so close to what I remembered from the Taiwan Tourismo in Amman, Jordan back in the day.
So when AdventureMan and I arrived in Seattle, at lunch time (our delicious breakfast from The Courtyard had finally worn off) we headed straight for O’Yeah Tasty.
We ordered fried egg rolls, and AdventureMan ordered the Seafood Three Delights, and I ordered my all time favorite Chong Qing Spicy Chicken.
And the dish that makes me cry, Chong Qing Spicy Chicken:
As we ate, the restaurant filled with Chinese students from the nearby college. We got to see what they were eating, even as we enjoyed our own food. There was so much food, we packed it up and took it with us to put in our hotel room refrigerator and have later for dinner.
This is how much I love this food: when we were talking with my mother who, by the grace of God is greatly improved, and improving more every day, she said she was able to go out for dinner this very night. A part of me ALMOST said “how about tomorrow night?” because I love that Chong Qing Spicy Chicken so much, but fortunately I love my mother more and the thought was just for an instant; we quickly made plans to take my mother to an Italian restaurant she loves this night and to have our treasured left-overs for dinner tomorrow.
If you are ever in Edmonds looking for spirited and authentic Szechuan cooking, hurry to O’Yeah, Tasty.
Dinner and Breakfast in The Courtyard
Sometimes you just take the easy way. We had a great lunch at Gojo, and we had a long day. We knew there were so many great places in Portland, and we were tired. We decided to grab something quick at The Courtyard.
When we walked the short walk down the hall from our room to the restaurant, we discovered it was packed!
We were happily surprised to be quickly seated, and were doubly happy when we saw the menu and some non-pubby kinds of food. We ordered the Curry Butternut Soup and the entree Heirloom Tomato Salad. The soup was a little sweet to our taste, but some like sweet more than others. The Heirloom Salad was fabulous, full of a lovely variety of tomatoes, really good and tasty greens, prosciutto, and a very tasty variety of olives.
We were very pleased. It was tasty, it was healthy and it was original in creation and presentation. We were so delighted that we decided to have breakfast in The Courtyard again the next morning. As we got there, one of the servers was loading the wood burning stove.
The menu had more surprises for breakfast, we found. AdventureMan ordered Biscuits and Gravy, but not your Southern biscuits and gravy. The biscuits are home-made and baked fresh, and the gravy was a gorgeous mushroom and rosemary combination that satisfied without coating his blood vessels. I had the smoked salmon benedict, which was served on rye bread and had lots of avocado and herbed cream cheese in addition to the salmon and poached eggs.
The day was cloudy and rainy but the warmth of the meal and service kept us cozy and happy and content all the way on the rainy drive from Portland to Seattle.
Thank goodness for Google Maps, which gets us in and out of cities in the most efficient, least trafficked way, and which has a voice that will tell AdventureMan in advance what is coming, and which lane he needs to be in and which way he will need to turn. We occasionally get into trouble, but rarely, and can quickly orient ourselves to where we need to be.
Gojo Ethiopian Food on Alberta Street in Portland
As if the easy access and the great hotel weren’t enough, within four minutes of our hotel is a delightful little Ethiopian restaurant, and we can’t get Ethiopian food in Pensacola. There were two or three groups already eating, and the smells drove us wild.
We ordered quickly, a vegetable combination plate and Doro Wat, a spicy chicken that always comes with a thick, hot sauce and a hard boiled egg. Actually, I don’t care that much about the chicken or the egg, it’s that thick hot spicy sauce I love. We also loved the smokey green beans and the vinegary greens, the pickled cabbage, the beet colored potatoes and the red and green lentils – it was all good, and not dumbed down.
Our meal:
Extra injera:
There are so many good possibilities for good food in Portland, but we are so stuffed we think we will never eat again!
McMenamins Kennedy School Hotel in Portland, OR
We don’t like cooky cutter hotels. When we start thinking about a trip, I put a lot of time into looking at hotels. I ask AdventureMan “do you want to stay downtown?” “What would you think about staying in a former poor-house?”
Not every choice turns out, but AdventureMan was kidding me because I still remember one really bad hotel in France in like 1987.
This time, I nailed it. I hit it out of the park. When I saw his face, I nearly danced for joy. He loves this place.
McMenamins is a trendy Oregon brewery that has done some really smart things – put good food into their breweries, and bought up old, decaying buildings, restored, renovated and turned them into hotels with charm and character. The one we are staying at is an old elementary school, and much of it is still in place – the wide hallways, the fabulous wooden floors, the signs for restrooms, gymnasium, etc. and classrooms which have been turned into guest suites.
The closet in our room is the former cloakroom, just like the very old school I went to school in, with hooks in place for students to hang their coats:
This is the major restaurant. There are also at least three bars, maybe four, and other spaces which are used for meetings and events.
One of the things we love is that the neighborhood and community gather here. There is a movie theater that plays current films; guests at the hotel get free admission, but other people are here, too. There is a soaking pool outside near the old gymnasium, and local mothers had their children in the pool, warm enough to be teaching them to swim on a cool rainy day in Portland.
It hits a lot of blocks for me – high ceilings, huge windows, wooden floors, all this and a sense of history and a gathering place for the community. Nearby is a growing arts and crafts street, gentrifying, with lots of really good restaurants. This is a really cool place for us. AdventureMan loves the history of the place, the glory of the vibrant plantings in the gardens, free parking and nearness to culture, food and convenience (drug store, very trendy grocery store, etc.) We like the Portland vibe.
Our Spring Adventure Begins: We Land in Portland
AdventureMan always know when I need to roam . . . I get edgy. I get bored. I get this trapped, wild feeling and I have to go roaming. I have to hit the road. For forty five years, God bless him, he has hit the road with me. He loves Adventures 🙂 and he is my best travel partner.
So we are up at oh-dark-thirty to catch the early flight to Atlanta and the ongoing flight to Portland, and the longer flight, Atlanta to Portland, isn’t full! We each have aisle seats, and we each have an empty seat between us and the closest other passenger! In this era of cattle-car air transport, we revel in space and celebrate these rare occasions.
When we arrive in Portland, the car rental pick up is right in the airport, just a short trek from the baggage pick-up. We are with Enterprise this time, and it was an easy check in and then a concierge car service as he told us to pick a car from those available. They were large trucks, and vans, and very big and not what we wanted, and then a Nissan came in and we said that one would be just fine. Within minutes we were on the road, and mere minutes later, at our hotel.
Great start to a great adventure.
Some Things You Can’t Make Up
In Pensacola, as in other places I have lived, I have met some very fine people. It isn’t unlike my other adventures, I have had to learn to observe and to adapt. Sometimes I may disagree, but most of the folk I deal with are civil people, reasonable people, and if they don’t agree with me, most of them have the generosity of spirit to just shake their head and chalk it up to my eccentricity.
And some people, you just don’t even bother to disagree. You don’t comment. You look the other way. I was lucky this time, to have my camera with me because if I didn’t have the picture, I’m not sure I would believe me telling the story. Here is what I see:
I see this and I am a stranger in a strange land.
The NRA Solution to Gun Violence: More Guns
I am livid. I am almost breathless with the shocking audacity of it. “Harden our schools.” And what does that mean, exactly?
“Harden our schools” means putting more armed people inside and outside. Arming our teachers, if Trump and the other NRA supported politicians have their way. More guns. More opportunity for fatal human error.
Our grandson goes to one of the sweetest elementary schools on earth. The thought of his teachers packing heat makes me ill. The thought of armed guards on his school outrages me.
What message does this send our children? Schools should be SAFE, fun places to learn and explore who they are and all the wonderful ideas in the world, places to learn to tools of learning. Guards? Guns? That describes a prison, not a safe, fun place to learn.
Yes, I am all for better mental health. Since the Republicans put the mentally ill out on the streets, back in the good old days of Ronald Reagan, we’ve had increased problems with crime, homelessness, and heartless policies of incarcerating the mentally ill because we no longer give them asylum. The prisons are full of the mentally ill.
Many mass killers have no prior criminal record. The Las Vegas killer was a very “normal,” if strange, man who had a lot of weapons, assault weapons.
I’m not opposed to guns. I am opposed to people owning guns that are neither for hunting nor for sport, weapons designed for killing, weapons that make a mass killer efficient.
“Guns don’t kill people,” say the NRA, “people kill people,” but killing people without an automatic or repeating weapon is a much less efficient kind of killing. While you are in the slower process, you can be attacked and overcome. Banning assault rifles just makes sense. Tightening who can own weapons just makes sense. Oregon just passed a landmark bill taking weapons away from domestic abusers, some of the smartest, most progressive legislation in the nation, passed by lawmakers with backbones and brains. You tell the parents of Sandy Hook students, tell the parents of Parkland students that “guns don’t kill people.” They will have a very different point of view to your own.
I challenge you to Google this: Mass School Shootings in the United States.
Wikipedia has a comprehensive, if incomplete record of many, not all, of the school related shootings. Some take place in school parking lots. Some target school buses. Many shooters have no criminal records, no mental health records, but – they DO have guns.
2nd Amendment rights were created to protect our country; the rights were for militia, not people with a grudge against a woman who is divorcing you, a teacher whose assessment prevented you from attaining your graduate degree, the woman who scorned you, revenge against those who bullied you, showing what a big “man” you are (not a single mass shooter has been a woman.) Owning a gun should be a privilege, not a right.
Those who know me, know I grew up with guns. The first thing we did, in the Alaska where I grew up, was to go to rifle club to learn respect for our weapons. We learned how to clean and care for them, we learned how to shoot them safely, and we learned how to lock them up. We used our rifles for hunting (we ate the meat) and for occasional target practice. We didn’t even carry them when we went berry picking or hikes in the woods; we learned to avoid bear and other dangers, to walk away. I am in favor of responsible gun ownership.
I am opposed to hardening schools as a solution to mass school shootings. It isn’t effective, and it sends a terrible message to our children.
Grandkid Update
Grandchildren activities take up a goodly portion of our current life here in Pensacola. They are a lot of fun, and they are also exhausting.
Q, who loves to read, is the happiest we have ever known him to be. He has a teacher who truly loves children and facilitates their success. He is excelling; it is like flying to him, he loves learning. We dance for joy that he loves to read; it is one of the most valuable tools in the tool-box. He is full, each day, of joyful energy. He comes in and immediately starts to jump on the trampoline, and, after snack, will climb back on to practice his spelling or vocabulary words. Baba / AdventureMan enriches his lessons and helps him research anything he doesn’t understand. Stopping by the grocery on his way home from school this week, AdventureMan asked if Q would like a cookie, and he said “No, but some of that smoked trout would be nice.” LOL! I love it that he loves smoked fish; it’s in the genes.
N, the four year old, is hilarious. Daughter and granddaughter of women who don’t accept boundaries (her mother played rugby!), she is all girl. She loves to wear dresses, especially those with twirl and sparkle, and skirts made out of netting, skirts that remind me of ballerinas and tutus. At the ballet last week, she was totally engrossed, moving her hands in attempts to mimic that motions of the dancers. She gets into my Middle Eastern perfumes and ends up smelling like a babe from the house of the rising sun. She loves to practice writing her letters, and she paints wonderful pictures.
I think of this one as “In a Gadda Da Vida” because of the leaf and the glued on droplets :-). You know it is me in the upper right hand corner because of the eyelashes.
I can only guess that the smiling face next to mine might be AdventureMan. Maybe he is wearing the fig leaf?
And here am I, in all my radiant glory. Can you figure out how I know it is me? No, not the green complexion, it is the big eyelashes and lipstick. Go girly girl!
That might be AdventureMan/Baba down at the bottom. We are never entirely sure without obvious clues.
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