2012 - Pacific Northwest
2012 - Pacific Northwest
We spent the last two weeks of August in Chimacum, Washington at the Evergreen Co-Op park. We are now #40 on the wait list for a lot in this Escapee Co-Op so we decided we should spend some more time there. Still not sure about it, but we did enjoy our time there.
Since we were on the Olympic Peninsula, Dave looked up a friend, Louis Graham, he hadn’t seen since his college days at Western Washington University. Lou lives in Bremerton. We had a very nice visit talking about the “old days” and all of the adventures had by everyone through the years. Sadly Lou’s wife and son passed away about five years ago. But Lou is carrying on by reading, reviewing books being submitted for publication and visiting local pubs! He even took us to one of his favorites for a late lunch and a brew of course.
One of the other things we did was go over to visit my sister on her birthday using the ferry system as that will be the way we would need to go to Seattle. To drive around would be 3 hours or so; it is much shorter by ferry. From Chimacum to Kingston was about 40 minutes, then a 20-30 minute ferry ride, then another 20 minutes to Margi’s place. To go into downtown, we could have also driven down to Bainbridge Island and taken a ferry directly into downtown. It is all part of living on the Olympic Peninsula.
This is the ferry landing at Kingston. We JUST made it on this ferry, the next one would leave about 35 minutes later. Round trip is about $30 with a car. Walk on would be less than $10, which is something that a lot of people do - leave the car in Kingston and have family/friends meet you on the other side in Edmonds, which is what we would probably do for a lot of visits. The picture at the top of the page was the other ferry on this route - they cross about half way across the sound and this is a route that has a lot of traffic, so the crossings are frequent.
This is a shot looking down at the car deck. It is amazing how many vehicles they can get on the ferries, everything from motorcycles to big 18 wheelers.
And here we are coming into Edmonds (north of Seattle) on the east side of Puget Sound.
In Montana we had a wonderful visit with Winslow, even getting out for a couple of lunches, one of which included his son Byron. Unfortunately there were several forest fires in the surrounding areas and most days the smoke was too bad to get outside, But we had a wonderful time talking about issues in higher education as well as politics [surprise!].
While in Hamilton we had our first taste of fall - the temperatures at night were cool and when we stopped in Missoula to get the car serviced, the temperature went below freezing and the furnace came on. It is definitely time to start our trek back to Texas.
The next installment will include a look at how Montana was hard on our coach!
Thursday, September 13, 2012
End of our Northwest Stay