Pacific Northwest & Vancouver, BC October 09

We spent seven weeks in Novato, California at my parents’ home, after returning from Breckenridge. We’d go to the gym most days, and in mid-September, intensified our search for a home in Marin or Solano Counties.

On October 22, we left Novato at 7:00 AM and headed north on The Redwood Highway. Just south of Eureka, we cut over to Ferndale, a preserved Victorian village with stately homes built in the 1800’s by wealthy milk barons. We visited the museum, walked the main street and had lunch at a local eatery.

Continuing north, we drove through the historic section of Eureka and continued up through Redwoods National Park. I had originally planned to camp at Prairie Creek, but we arrived there before 3:00 PM and decided to keep going so we would not have to drive so long Friday. We stopped several times at various beaches along the highway where we saw waves as high as ten feet. After driving 500 miles, we stopped in Coos Bay in Oregon where we found a Comfort Inn to stay for the night.

We awoke Friday to rain so I was glad we decided not to camp. After breakfast, we started back on 101 North before 8:00 AM. The road hugs the coast and if the weather had been better we would have had nice views of the Pacific. It took us over two hours to reach Lincoln, which was less than 100 miles, so we decided to take 20 East and continue north on Route 5.

At Salem, we stopped for lunch at Applebee’s. By 5:00 PM, we had completed 500 miles and decided to stop in Seattle for the night. We found a Comfort Inn north of the city where we will only have two hours left to drive tomorrow to Vancouver. We decided to order Chinese food and ate in our room.

Saturday morning we had breakfast at the hotel and were on the road by 8:00 AM. The trees are bright orange and red reminding me of autumn in New England. We crossed over the Canadian boarder and called Cindy’s friend Carrie from Beijing who we planned to visit, and made arrangements to meet at her home near The University of British Columbia. Carrie has been in Vancouver four years and now works for the Port of Vancouver. We met her mother who is helping take care of Carrie’s seven-year-old son Andy. She has a two-bedroom condominium in beautiful UBC campus.

Carrie and Andy took us to see some of the sights in Vancouver. The Winter Olympics will be held here early next year and the city is busy preparing for the onslaught of tourists. We parked at Canada Place near Carrie’s office and walked through Gastown where we stopped to eat lunch at The Old Spaghetti Factory. We visited Chinatown and then drove over to Stanley Park. We dropped Carrie and Andy back at their house and drove back downtown where we checked into The Sutton Place Hotel for two nights.

After resting for a couple hours, we got dressed and went downstairs where we met Carrie and her friend Li Deng and headed over to Richmond for dinner. Fifteen percent of Vancouver’s population is Chinese and it seems they all live in Richmond. We ate at a very traditional restaurant featuring Sichuan food, ordering at least a dozen dishes. Li is a principal researcher at Microsoft and we occupied our time talking about real estate. He lives in Seattle so we might meet him again when we return to Seattle on Tuesday.

Sunday morning we walked down to the waterfront and took a water taxi across to Granville Island. This is a popular marketplace where we walked through hundreds of stalls selling food, arts & crafts. We ate lunch at Bridges and when it started to rain we took a taxi back to the hotel.

Sunday night we were invited back over to Carrie's house where her mother cooked hotpot for us. Andy showed us his new WII, which he had learned to play by reading the entire instruction book by himself. After dinner, Andy entertained us by playing several songs on the piano.

We left Vancouver at 9:00 AM Monday morning, heading back to Seattle. We got lost as we drove through Richmond, but recovered and passed through US Customs in less than 30 minutes. I had made a reservation to take the Boeing Tour at 1:00 PM so we had time to stop for breakfast at a Denny’s, just over the boarder.

We arrived in Everett and joined about 40 people on a 90-minute tour of the aircraft manufacturing facilities. The main building is the largest in the world and would completely enclose Disneyland with 12-acres to spare. We saw 747s being built in one area, 767s in another and the newest plane, the composite 787 Dreamliner, being assembled in a third area. The first test flight of the 787 is scheduled for next month. Before leaving, we saw a huge Dreamlifter, used to bring in large sections of the 787 from around the world, take off on the Everett runway.

Driving another 30-minutes south, we arrived in Seattle at 3:30 PM and went immediately to The Space Needle. The weather was good, for Seattle, and Cindy was able to get some good pictures of the surrounding city and bay. I had reservations at The Edgewater Hotel on the waterfront only a few blocks from the Space Needle. We checked into our room and then walked along the waterfront down to the Ferry Terminal, then turned around and walked back. We had a great dinner at Anthony’s Pier 66 before returning to our room.

As usual, I arose around 5:00 AM and headed downstairs to the lobby where I had coffee and wrote in my journal while overlooking the water from the cozy lobby of the hotel. Cindy was up by 8:00 AM and we had a delicious breakfast before heading out to The Pike Place Market. We spent several hours wandering through the stalls, and then did a tour of downtown before returning to the hotel to check out.

We took the 2:05 PM ferry to Bainbridge Island and then drove to Poulsbo where we visited Peter & Meg Gotch who gave us a thoughtful wedding gift. We left just in time to catch the opening of the drawbridge over the Hood Canal so we spent a half-hour on the bridge watching a boat go through. There is a submarine base a few miles up the Hood Canal and submarines come and go frequently, but we did not see any today. By 7:00 PM we had reached Sequim where we checked into a Quality Inn for the night. Sequim is the largest lavender-producing region in North America, and would be a beautiful place to visit during the summer.

October 28^th we planned to spend at Olympic National Park. The snow-covered peaks of the Olympic Mountains were visible from our room. We checked out of our hotel and drove into Port Angeles where we found the Olympic National Park Visitors Center. Unfortunately, our first planned destination, Hurricane Ridge, was closed due to snow and ice on the road. The Parks service is not budgeted to operate their snowplows until November 15^th, so if there is an early snow, they just close the road. Hurricane Ridge offers sweeping views of the mountains and when I was here several years ago, I saw a large herd of elk in the valley. We watched a movie on the park and then continued to other areas, which were open.

Our second stop was Sol Duc. There are salmon cascades were we hoped to see salmon jumping the rapids, but gave up after a half hour of seeing no fish. We continued driving twenty miles along the Sol Duc River to the trailhead where I began my 3-day hike the last time I was here. Our third stop in Olympic Park was at the Hoh Rain Forest. Here we hiked through moss-covered trees, which created a spooky feeling, especially with Halloween coming in two days.

At 4:00 PM we drove to Kalaloch Lodge, an oceanfront hotel within the park, operated by Aramark. We found a log cabin with a view of the ocean, and then went for a walk on the beach. The tide was low and the waves were not too big, but the beach was very wide with the upper section covered with huge trees that wash down in rivers and then get pushed up onto the beach by the waves. The sky was overcast with rain threatening so we did not see the spectacular sunset, which I had hoped for. We had dinner at the lodge and then returned to our cabin where I built a fire.

Thursday it rained all day. We drove over to Olympia, but instead of continuing east to visit Mt. Rainier National Park and Mt. St. Helens, we decided we would not be able to see much so continued south on Route 5. When we reached Springfield, Oregon, we stopped for the night and hoped that the weather would clear for tomorrow.

It was still overcast Friday morning, but the rain had stopped. The Rim Road at Crater National Park was closed so we decided to save that park for another day and continued our southbound trip on Route 5. In Medford, Oregon, we stopped to tour the Harry & David facilities, and then drove another couple of hours to Redding, California where we stopped for the night. As we approached Redding we had spectacular views of Mt. Shasta, which was covered with snow.

Cindy woke up with a cold on Sunday morning, but after taking some medication decided we could squeeze in a couple more tourist activities before heading home. We ate breakfast at the hotel and checked out at 8:30 AM. We were only a couple of miles from the Sundial Bridge in Redding so we drove there and walked across. The pedestrian bridge crosses the Sacramento River and is also a gigantic sundial.

After checking to be sure the road through Lassen Volcanic National Park was open, we drove an hour east and entered the park at the northwest corner. There was a prescribed-burn taking place, which engulfed the lower portion of the park in smoke. After a brief stop at the visitor’s center, we continued through the volcanic features of the park. Lassen last erupted in 1914 and there are spectacular video and still photographs of the event. The trail to the summit was closed, but we did see boiling mud pots and vents spewing steam and gases. We left Lassen just after noon and headed back to Route 5.

In Corning, the olive capital of North America, we stopped at the Olive Pit to sample olives. I was interested in a factory tour of the packing plant, but it was closed on Saturday. We completed the final part of our drive and were back in Novato by 4:00 PM.

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