Prepping for takeoff

We are staying in a very nice AirBnb in the North End of Tacoma, taking care of business, getting doctor visits and prescriptions out of the way,  and rounding up all the remaining documents we think we will need.  We plan to rest, visit friends and family who are available, and learn as much Spanish as we can before we fly out again.

I will start posting again before we take off from Sea-Tac on our Norwegian Air flight to London that leaves at 1:30pm on September 18, 2017.  We will be staying one night at our last AirBnb in the U.S.  near Sea-Tac on 9/17/2017.

Mount St. Helens Visitor Center

Home, at  last!  Well, figuratively speaking anyway.  We are currently "home free", but we are back in Tacoma, WA for almost 3 weeks.  Yes, it's two days early and we had to find another AirBnb for those nights, but we made it.

On the way, we stopped at the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center.  It looks much more recovered now than it did the last time Meghan and I stopped when she was a Girl Scout.

Visited the Peninsula Historical Museum in Gig Harbor.  First we viewed the Galloping Gertie display, with a piece of the actual bridge.

This is a huge piece of metal salvaged from Galluping Gertie.

Then, Steve showed me the Shenandoah, the fishing boat he was helping to restore when he volunteered with the Museum before we left.

Steve created this display

and he built this, too.

Steve stands in front of the Shenandoah.  He painted the inside of the pilothouse and helped with the huge project of scraping the outside of the boat and removing all the rotten wood.

Today, Steve joined the Tacoma Rose Society trimming roses at the Point Defiance Rose Garden, their usual Thursday event during the summer.  I visited the old Elks Club building while waiting for an appointment downtown.  It's still a dilapidated mess, even though McMenniman's is supposed to be working on it.  But, the Spanish Steps are still lovely, built in 1906.  It will be wonderful when the whole project is finished.  I'm ready for a swim.  Hope they rebuild the pool.

The outside of the building still looks pretty bad, notice the elk's head with the bare metal rods where the antlers should be.

Driving the coast of Oregon and Washington

Okay, I'm tired of the road trip now and I suspect Steve is too.  It has been almost 2 months since we hit the road on July 5.  I think we are probably both in Europe in our heads now.  We fly out on September 18, 2017 and land at Gatwick Airport,  London at 7am on September 19.  No more road trip; we'll be walking and riding from then on.

But,  we still have to get back to Tacoma.  So, today, we drove up the coast, across the Astoria bridge, and landed in Long Beach, Washington.  But, the motels in our price range were pretty iffy.  So, here we are in Longview, Washington at the Quality Inn.  The view is not much to talk about.

On the way up in the Tillamook, Oregon area near Garibaldi, we discovered Barview Jetty County Park where we stopped to stretch our legs.  It has a beautiful beach and a campground that many people don't know about and we found by accident.  There was also an interesting flock of gulls that I became slightly obsessed with, as you will see.

There are two jetties and a dike here to protect and support the entrance to Tillamook Bay.

This is the US Army Corps of Engineers' lookout tower at the entrance to  Tillamook Bay.

The Danger sign in front of this rock means that only seagulls can sit on the jetty.

The mist hung over the whole area, holding down the smoke in the air, I think.

Fishermen leaving Tillamook Bay on their way out for the day.

It was a beautiful drive with many more beach views.  We stopped at Tolovana Beach State Park just south of Cannon Beach, walked the beach, had a delicious lunch at Mo's, and saved two children from disease.

The rocks of Cannon Beach are just next door.

This sign over the opening of a rusty pipe at the entrance to the beach says, "Warning: untreated drainage water may be contaminated with animal waste.  Do not play int it! Wash hands throughly before eating."

 We read the sign and then walked alongside the "drainage" onto the beach and noticed 2 children (about 8 and 5) in their bathing suits happily digging in the sand on the edge of the drainage stream to make "drainage" pools and sand castles with their buckets and shovels.    [I ask you, what the heck is contaminated water doing draining onto a public beach where children play?  Sometimes, I truly wonder what goes through people's minds.  One little sign is not enough, either.]

The drainage that many of us thought was a small creek entering the sea, like many Oregon beaches.

So, as we passed them, I stopped to ask the oldest child, a girl, if her parents had read the sign above the stream of water.  If not, I said, she should point it out to them because this water probably has animal waste in it.  I pointed out that meant animal poop.  We kept walking and, when I looked back, an older lady (maybe Grandma) was gathering up the children and moving them away from the drainage.  Maybe I saved a life today.  "All in a day's work, Ma'am.  We librarians are purveyors of information."

The view of the Astoria bridge from the Washington side on the road to Long Beach.

We crossed the Astoria Bridge twice today.  Tomorrow, we will probably be driving back up I-5 towards Tacoma.  We have two more nights before our AirBnb reservation starts there.  Until then, we'll follow the clean air and see where it takes us; maybe Olympia or Gig Harbor.

The Oregon coast and inland - Corvallis is special to me

Beautiful Lincoln City, Oregon, with the sound of the Pacific crashing outside our motel room!  We traveled to Corvallis, OR today and took a whole lot of photographs (those were for both you and me, Mom).  Then, we headed through Philomoth, OR and on to the Oregon beaches.

Corvallis, OR, the home of Oregon State University, was where we spent last night.  I was exhausted because of all the smoke in the air and the asthma it triggered.  Our trip from Weed, CA was fraught with thicker and thicker smoke from at least 6 wildfires to the north and east of us.  I-5 was never threatened, but the burning of those poor forests made the air quality very bad.  I wore a filtration mask and we ran the AC on recirculate and that helped.

We stayed at a nice motel in Corvallis, OR - the University Inn - and both of us zonked out after the grueling drive.  When we woke up, there was a little smoke in the air, but not any where near as much as we saw on the trip up. So, this morning, Mom, we drove around Corvallis and I took some photographs.  I have nailed down the place where Grandma and Grandpa lived, either 11th and Jefferson,

 which looks like this now.  Across the street to the right is a large parking lot next to a tall dormitory building.

Or, it looks like this, the very large parking lot next to the tall dorm which is where 10th St would have been.  I remember that the University had built a tall dorm across the street from their house the last time we visited before they moved, when the U bought them out.

The campus is still really beautiful, retaining a large number of the gorgeous old buildings that were there when I was young.

They even have a few conifers whose branches go all the way to the ground for children (or students) to hide in and pretend.

This green house on, 12th Street, looks familiar somehow.

Are these houses you remember, Mom?

After the trip down memory lane, we drove to the beach and found this:

Depoe Bay, Oregon

Our motel in Lincoln City on the right, Beachfront Manor Inn - Lincoln City.

Steve is a water guy.  The beach suits him.  Too bad it's so darn cold.

Tomorrow, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Astoria and probably back down to Portland for a couple days of AirBnb before Sept. 1 in Tacoma.

Northern California during the wildfires

The plan had been to drive up the California coast on Route 101 and to spend the night in Brookings, Oregon tonight.  But, we heard last night that whole town of Brookings was evacuated due to a wildfire in the Suislaw National Forest that was coming too close.  So, we tried to check with several authorities in Eureka, CA to find out if route 299 was still safe from wildfire and discovered that all of those authorities (fire stations, police stations, Forest Service, and National Park Service offices) are closed up tight on weekends.  Eventually, the California State Patrol phone number confirmed that 299 would be safe and probably smoke-free.

Route 299 was very beautiful, though, with the Rogue River winding through next to the road and the Redwoods sprinkled through the forests.  It was a very windy road, perfect for listening to Fleetwood Mac's Mystery to Me album.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFTKnuilf2c 

It was a such a long drive that I finally realized that I have Audible books that we could listen to and pulled out The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King.  I love that book and it was wonderful to be able to listen to the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes story being narrated as we traveled.  I really wish I had remembered those audio books a long time ago.  I don't have many, but we could go on to the 2nd book in that series The Monstrous Regiment of Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, or even Pippi Longstocking.  This will not be forgotten again!

After driving until way after dark, we are now in a motel in Weed, California (I know, it's not what you think. Weed was named for Abner Weed who discovered the area).  We will be heading tomorrow for either Portland or the Northern Oregon beaches by way of Corvallis again.  Neither are threatened by wildfires, thank goodness.

The Rogue River and NO wildfires.

We made it!