I crossed over into Vancouver, WA from Portland and headed to Mount Rainier National Park by passing Mount St. Helen. The day was unusually clear for the area so the sun felt really good in the crisp air of the Pacific Northwest. The air is heavy and moist here but it feels good to breathe in as the slight smell of wood caresses your nose. Its cold and refreshing. I stopped planning these past few weeks, just rough ideas of where and when or what Steinbeck calls vacilando. I drove from the south end of the park and just continued until I hit the fork for Sunrise and White River, about an hour into the park. Mount Rainier is big, in every way and I felt silly looking for it at first because once I turned a bend it was obvious. While both campgrounds are privately wooded and close to the same general area, I choose site D23 at White River campground because it is one of the only with a view of Mount Rainier (Photo#1 & 2). There are multiple loops but I choose to be in the sun and with the river roaring alongside campsite. I just love camping by water whether it is a creek or lake and if fact it is what I prefer, compare to desert or forest camping (Photo #3 & 4).
I decided to take a break from my massive endeavor to read the 900 plus paged “Don Quixote” that I have been tackling and loving and try something lighter. So I grabbed John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley”, one of the used books from Powell’s Books in Portland. It is a paperback copy from 1980 and cost $4, somehow I like it better that way. First, it was quite odd that Steinbeck named his means of travel Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse since I was reading that prior and had no knowledge of the link. Second, let me just say, that I do not think I have ever been so infatuated with an author so quickly. I love Steinbeck and while I indulged forcibly in high school I do not think I actually gasp or accepted what “Of Mice and Men” was. Everything this 60-year man wrote is exactly what I am experiencing now forty years later and exactly what I am thinking and feeling as a 25-year-old girl. How can I relate to an author so much from such a different time and background? That is what is so amazing about reading. Steinbeck just writes so eloquently about a trip and its planning that I just have to quote him below:
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
"In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction."
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
I almost finished the whole book while laying in my hammock in the sun next to the river, with Mount Rainier in the background but as the sun drifted behind the trees, the temperature dropped greatly and so I retired into my tent, dragging Lucy, of course. It was cold that night; probably the coldest so far as Lucy woke me up by sitting on my chest shivering. I felt horrible since her pampered self did not ask for any adventures, so I wrapped her in my Patagonia fleece blanket and held her the rest of the night but she could not shake her shivers. I know it is probably sacrilegious that I did not hike or bike at Mount Rainier but again because I am alone. I just don’t feel safe to go alone on trails more then a mile from any major road. I always think of that guy who had to cut off his arm and since I am a klutz it is not unlikely that I would fall and not be found. But on that note, there are endless scenic activities for the park and I will have to return one day. As I exited a huge six point buck causally munched along the roadside and paid no mind to me (Photo #5).
The next morning I left early to meet my friend from the Keys mother in Puyallup, just south of Seattle. You know those awkward moments you have sometimes especially with other people’s parents – we did not have any of those. It was so organic as we chatted for over an hour and a half at Anthem Coffee on East Pioneer and 2nd. My friend in the Keys would talk about this coffee place, formerly called Forza, all the time and his mother is such a regular, her drink was waiting as she walked through the door (http://anthemcoffeeandtea.com/) (Photo #6). The staff and owner were so entertaining and a real joy for so early in the morning. As I continue to explore this region, I am starting to understand finally why Starbucks is not that great. Good coffee and espresso, for me, should not be acidic or bitter and Anthem definitely has a smooth but strong brew. It is funny to check out someone’s old stumping grounds without them there especially because as you see where someone grew up or meet their parents you feel you understand them and their quirks a little better. As we moved onto to breakfast at the Rose Diner just down the street on 2nd to meet her husband, my new friend brought me a bag of their espresso roast to take home with me (Photo#7).
I just love diners, probably because as a teenager, I would hang out with my friends and drink coffee for hours, all oblivious to the fact we were tying up the waitress’s table. I just like sitting in a booth and watching the people and staff interact over classic breakfast foods. At this particular place, the regulars each have a coffee mug from home that sits on a hook waiting in anticipation for their next visit. My Rose scramble with eggs, hash browns, peppers, ham and cheese was so filling and not greasy at all. I relished the company and truly enjoy the visit. I left smiling until I hit the traffic into Seattle.
While I like Seattle as a town a lot, I do not like the streets and traffic. Not that there are tons of cars but the lights are so short and the streets are laid out so funny, that it causes traffic. On a whole though, I had a great night in the city. After putting Lucy away at the hotel, I took a quick fifteen minute walk to the famous Pike’s Place Market that I probably first learned about way back in the day with Real World Seattle (Photo #8 & 9). The area surrounding the market is basically the Loop and Michigan Avenue of Chicago only more compact and so equally amusing to see. However I don’t know what it is about girls and little markets but we go ga-ga. Immediately, I remember the French Market in New Orleans and Centro Mercado in Santiago and this one was pretty much in line with those twos greats. There are beautiful arrangements of flowers along side big bins of crabs and oysters and as fish fly across for the tourists delight, musicians are playing washboards and spoons outside the birthplace of corporate icons like Starbucks. There are nooks, crannies, alleys and stairways that lead out to the Ferris wheel on the water, to little dining areas, multiple levels of various stores to fresh farmer markets and flower vendors (Photos #10-21). You can get lost for days and still never see everything. I purchased way too much stuff including an Einstein etching at From the Heart Pottery (http://www.from-the-heart-pottery.com/) and a Lucite key ring of a Northwest coast artifact replica from (www.danielleen.com) (Photos#22 & 23). I also got fresh honey infused with lavender and a hand blown glass jar closed with a huge baseball sized cork. After all that shopping, I made my own over to Piroshky, Piroshky right in time and did not wait long to get a potato, cheese and onion one (Photos #24-28). Growing up German and Irish I love me some potatoes and dumpling type food so I found the Russian pastry equally as tasty and it was fun to watch the old ladies making them fresh. I also tried the famous northeastern style Clam Chowder at Jacks and one Quilcene Oyster for .50 cents (Photos #29-31). That oyster blew the ones at Swan away but was completely different. It was creamy and sweet and I enjoyed the aftertaste greatly. There were droves of people sitting at the corner and waiting to sit as Jack’s fried fish and chips are suppose to be the best. For dessert, I grabbed a pumpkin cookie at Cinnamon Works and a Thai Ice Tea at Jasmine Thai (Photos #32-36). Everything was made well by its standards and the day at the market was just right and exactly what I love to do.
Randomly, I found out an old friend from high school lived in Seattle and surprisingly enough we got our plans together in time to met up at Uber Tavern on Aurora Avenue (http://www.uberbier.com/). He is actually first person since I left high school eight years ago (OMG) that I met up with and it was a blast. We had tons to talk about and then he even took we to play Frisbee Golf or Folf. For those Seinfeld fans, it is the summer of shirlee officially now. The course is laid out like golf with pars and the hole is a set of chains over a receptacle (Photos #37-39). I can throw a football and baseball well above average but I could never grasp the art of throwing a Frisbee however I did fairly well and we played the front 9 well into dusk. I would for sure go again and always appreciate learning new things. I finished Seattle the next morning at Victorola Coffee Roasters on Pine and Bellevue (Photo #40). I enjoyed my newly acquired admiration for good coffee while using their free Wi-Fi to post this blog. It has a perfect cappuccino and entertaining to watch the roasting room while listening to calming world music at the windowsill seat (Photo #41).
Downtown Seattle is really fun and the city has a certain texture that is somewhat unexplainable. The colors, smell, sights and especially food are special and unique. I enjoyed my short stay here and my wonderful visits with new and old friends. I am heading into another straight week of camping to Olympic and North Cascades National Parks in Washington so stay tuned for the second to last leg of this adventure.
I decided to take a break from my massive endeavor to read the 900 plus paged “Don Quixote” that I have been tackling and loving and try something lighter. So I grabbed John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley”, one of the used books from Powell’s Books in Portland. It is a paperback copy from 1980 and cost $4, somehow I like it better that way. First, it was quite odd that Steinbeck named his means of travel Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse since I was reading that prior and had no knowledge of the link. Second, let me just say, that I do not think I have ever been so infatuated with an author so quickly. I love Steinbeck and while I indulged forcibly in high school I do not think I actually gasp or accepted what “Of Mice and Men” was. Everything this 60-year man wrote is exactly what I am experiencing now forty years later and exactly what I am thinking and feeling as a 25-year-old girl. How can I relate to an author so much from such a different time and background? That is what is so amazing about reading. Steinbeck just writes so eloquently about a trip and its planning that I just have to quote him below:
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
"In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction."
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
I almost finished the whole book while laying in my hammock in the sun next to the river, with Mount Rainier in the background but as the sun drifted behind the trees, the temperature dropped greatly and so I retired into my tent, dragging Lucy, of course. It was cold that night; probably the coldest so far as Lucy woke me up by sitting on my chest shivering. I felt horrible since her pampered self did not ask for any adventures, so I wrapped her in my Patagonia fleece blanket and held her the rest of the night but she could not shake her shivers. I know it is probably sacrilegious that I did not hike or bike at Mount Rainier but again because I am alone. I just don’t feel safe to go alone on trails more then a mile from any major road. I always think of that guy who had to cut off his arm and since I am a klutz it is not unlikely that I would fall and not be found. But on that note, there are endless scenic activities for the park and I will have to return one day. As I exited a huge six point buck causally munched along the roadside and paid no mind to me (Photo #5).
The next morning I left early to meet my friend from the Keys mother in Puyallup, just south of Seattle. You know those awkward moments you have sometimes especially with other people’s parents – we did not have any of those. It was so organic as we chatted for over an hour and a half at Anthem Coffee on East Pioneer and 2nd. My friend in the Keys would talk about this coffee place, formerly called Forza, all the time and his mother is such a regular, her drink was waiting as she walked through the door (http://anthemcoffeeandtea.com/) (Photo #6). The staff and owner were so entertaining and a real joy for so early in the morning. As I continue to explore this region, I am starting to understand finally why Starbucks is not that great. Good coffee and espresso, for me, should not be acidic or bitter and Anthem definitely has a smooth but strong brew. It is funny to check out someone’s old stumping grounds without them there especially because as you see where someone grew up or meet their parents you feel you understand them and their quirks a little better. As we moved onto to breakfast at the Rose Diner just down the street on 2nd to meet her husband, my new friend brought me a bag of their espresso roast to take home with me (Photo#7).
I just love diners, probably because as a teenager, I would hang out with my friends and drink coffee for hours, all oblivious to the fact we were tying up the waitress’s table. I just like sitting in a booth and watching the people and staff interact over classic breakfast foods. At this particular place, the regulars each have a coffee mug from home that sits on a hook waiting in anticipation for their next visit. My Rose scramble with eggs, hash browns, peppers, ham and cheese was so filling and not greasy at all. I relished the company and truly enjoy the visit. I left smiling until I hit the traffic into Seattle.
While I like Seattle as a town a lot, I do not like the streets and traffic. Not that there are tons of cars but the lights are so short and the streets are laid out so funny, that it causes traffic. On a whole though, I had a great night in the city. After putting Lucy away at the hotel, I took a quick fifteen minute walk to the famous Pike’s Place Market that I probably first learned about way back in the day with Real World Seattle (Photo #8 & 9). The area surrounding the market is basically the Loop and Michigan Avenue of Chicago only more compact and so equally amusing to see. However I don’t know what it is about girls and little markets but we go ga-ga. Immediately, I remember the French Market in New Orleans and Centro Mercado in Santiago and this one was pretty much in line with those twos greats. There are beautiful arrangements of flowers along side big bins of crabs and oysters and as fish fly across for the tourists delight, musicians are playing washboards and spoons outside the birthplace of corporate icons like Starbucks. There are nooks, crannies, alleys and stairways that lead out to the Ferris wheel on the water, to little dining areas, multiple levels of various stores to fresh farmer markets and flower vendors (Photos #10-21). You can get lost for days and still never see everything. I purchased way too much stuff including an Einstein etching at From the Heart Pottery (http://www.from-the-heart-pottery.com/) and a Lucite key ring of a Northwest coast artifact replica from (www.danielleen.com) (Photos#22 & 23). I also got fresh honey infused with lavender and a hand blown glass jar closed with a huge baseball sized cork. After all that shopping, I made my own over to Piroshky, Piroshky right in time and did not wait long to get a potato, cheese and onion one (Photos #24-28). Growing up German and Irish I love me some potatoes and dumpling type food so I found the Russian pastry equally as tasty and it was fun to watch the old ladies making them fresh. I also tried the famous northeastern style Clam Chowder at Jacks and one Quilcene Oyster for .50 cents (Photos #29-31). That oyster blew the ones at Swan away but was completely different. It was creamy and sweet and I enjoyed the aftertaste greatly. There were droves of people sitting at the corner and waiting to sit as Jack’s fried fish and chips are suppose to be the best. For dessert, I grabbed a pumpkin cookie at Cinnamon Works and a Thai Ice Tea at Jasmine Thai (Photos #32-36). Everything was made well by its standards and the day at the market was just right and exactly what I love to do.
Randomly, I found out an old friend from high school lived in Seattle and surprisingly enough we got our plans together in time to met up at Uber Tavern on Aurora Avenue (http://www.uberbier.com/). He is actually first person since I left high school eight years ago (OMG) that I met up with and it was a blast. We had tons to talk about and then he even took we to play Frisbee Golf or Folf. For those Seinfeld fans, it is the summer of shirlee officially now. The course is laid out like golf with pars and the hole is a set of chains over a receptacle (Photos #37-39). I can throw a football and baseball well above average but I could never grasp the art of throwing a Frisbee however I did fairly well and we played the front 9 well into dusk. I would for sure go again and always appreciate learning new things. I finished Seattle the next morning at Victorola Coffee Roasters on Pine and Bellevue (Photo #40). I enjoyed my newly acquired admiration for good coffee while using their free Wi-Fi to post this blog. It has a perfect cappuccino and entertaining to watch the roasting room while listening to calming world music at the windowsill seat (Photo #41).
Downtown Seattle is really fun and the city has a certain texture that is somewhat unexplainable. The colors, smell, sights and especially food are special and unique. I enjoyed my short stay here and my wonderful visits with new and old friends. I am heading into another straight week of camping to Olympic and North Cascades National Parks in Washington so stay tuned for the second to last leg of this adventure.
RSS Feed
