portland, olympic penninsula, victoria

July 28

 

I haven’t been able to post for a couple of days because we were either without wifi or the kids had used up all the charge in their laptops.  Portland was a really cool city.  We walked the Northwest side after having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant called Silk.  I had a dish called CaRi, yams, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables in a coconut-based yellow curry.  I now have to reconfigure my list of favorite dishes and place that one somewhere in the top five.  The city is full of interesting shops and a well-established hippie culture (some genuine, some hippie-chic). 

 

We stayed in Portland only two nights because the campground was a little strange.  It’s a huge trailer park with an area devoted to rv’ers.  We picked it because it’s close to the city on a little island on the Columbia River.  As soon as we pulled in (at about eight in the evening), we were greeted by two friendly (that could also be read too friendly) obstinate, neighbor cats from hell.  Our initial impression of “well aren’t they nice,” turned into “WTF is wrong with these guys!” Our protestations escalated from “Hey, get off the table so we can eat,” to tossing water on them.  At that, they simply rotated their heads around on their limber little feline necks to nonchalantly lick it off and meow as if to say, “Yeah, yeah, so when do we get dinner?”  The only friendly person we met there was a sweet woman who seemed almost as starved for attention as the cats.  She really was nice and helped us plan a little bit for our trip up the Olympic Peninsula.

 

We headed out early and decided we’d try to make it to Quinalt Lake, about thirty miles inland. We stayed at a very friendly little private campground there that had a site looking out over the lake.  It was peaceful and beautiful and we slept about a hundred yards from the world’s largest Sitga (I think) spruce.  This was actually kind of sad, because a wind storm had come through the area and broken off the top of it as well as a mile wide swath up the east side of the hill beside the lake.  We hiked what had been a woodsy trail to find ourselves walking through a wasteland of fallen BIG trees. It should have been cold and misty, but there was no shade left and the area was experiencing a heat-wave to boot, so the experience was foreign even to us foreigners.  The scale of the devastation was sickening.  There is so little of the peninsula that has not been logged and these pristine old giants had been swatted down like match-sticks.  Huge root disks stuck thirty feet in the air while hundred foot long trunks lied tangled together.  We did see a spectacular, glowing rose tinted post-sunset sky with a crescent moon over the lake that seemed to say, nature can be terrible but it is also incredibly beautiful.

 

We drove to Forks the next day (Sunday).  Ursula and I now know more than we could ever have hoped to about sexy, teen-vampire romances.  We drove out to La Push where we had salmon burgers and fries on the “Treaty line,” picked up some cool rocks from the beach, and took a picture or two of the cliff.  We made our way to Lake Crescent where we cooled off (the weather here is abnormally and disturbingly hot) in the snow-melt water and then hid from the mosquitos inside the camper.

 

Monday was a FULL day.  We drove to Port Angeles (Ursula declared it cute) and had a wonderful breakfast waiting for the ferry to Victoria.   The Ferry ride was expensive, but relaxing.  Victoria is a bustling town that is the prettiest city we’ve seen on the trip.  It is my favorite so far.  We had a great time going from shop to shop and left early to catch the six o’clock ferry to Vancouver.  The tab for the second ferry brought our total ocean-going expenses to around two hundred and fifty dollars.  How do the Victorians do it?   We had a great conversation with an amazing lady named Dhina.  She was an Ethiopian born physicist who lived in both Switzerland and Sweden and was here vacationing alone.  The hour and a half trip on the sunny deck with cool salt-water wind in our hair and a picturesque

Mount Baker in the distance went by in what seemed like only a few minutes.

 

Ursula and the kids were feeling courageous and wanted to see if we could make it to Vancouver WITHOUT having a reserved campsite. After some less than admirable navigating and ensuing still-on-the-road-after-dusk-nail-biting, we are now at an elaborate facility about five miles out of Vancouver in an area called Surrey.