Today launches the first post-covid travel blog. There have been a few short trips, either long weekends or family visits, but this is the first bona fide purely recreational trip, albeit a driving rather than flying trip and one that doesn’t involve changing time zones. The 4 parts of the trip are in British Columbia (Victoria then a bit east of Vancouver) and Washington (Leavenworth and Seattle).
The cast of characters will be international as well — friends from the US, Canada, and Europe. The main characters will be David (who some may recall as “the Driver” in a series of Facebook posts in September 2021) and me.
Today’s plan was to leave home and meander our way to Tacoma. Why Tacoma? Because we’re picking up friends at the Seattle airport (“SeaTac”) tomorrow morning before 9am and we didn’t want to wake up at oh dark thirty to do that. Besides, it gave us an excuse to find a few caches today — 20 for David and at least one less for me.
Perhaps that fun 4+ mile nighttime kayak excursion that I took last night with friends wasn’t the best choice — we got home after midnight and until I decompressed, got ready for bed and read a bit it was after 2 when I turned out the light (David supported but did not participate in the excursion and wisely went to sleep by 1). Surprisingly, I didn’t wake up incredibly stiff, though as the day continued I discovered new muscles that made their presence known.
Another choice yesterday that may not have been perfect was buying a half-flat of blueberries and a half-flat of blackberries and strawberries. But the blueberries were on sale and how can I possibly be expected to resist the urge to buy one of my favorite fruits at a reasonable price? The blackberries were to fulfill a request from a friend for blackberry-lime sorbet, which was prepared yesterday afternoon and is now in the freezer at home, and the strawberries were probably the last we will get this season (Albions, not Hoods, so they were merely “delicious” and not a “religious experience”). Let the record show that David has assisted in consuming the remaining berries, and he recognizes that I demonstrated unmitigated love by ceding not only the last blackberry but also the last strawberry to him. Meanwhile, we have a few blueberries sitting in our hotel fridge tonight, though there will be fewer after this blog posts than there were before I started, though we should have a few to offer our friends at SeaTac.
We found caches at rest stops and in a town called Steilacoom that I’d seen signs for but never visited. Lunch was a picnic in a park in the delightfully named town of Tumwater, and dinner was shrimp at a Tacoma restaurant. But what’s a shrimp dinner on a warm (over 90F/32C) day without a frozen dessert? We found a frozen yogurt place but both the non-dairy (for me) and dairy (for David) flavors were uninspiring so we went to the next-door grocery store and got a pint of Ben and Jerry’s non-dairy fudge brownie. It was quite frozen so we did what any respectable geocacher would do, namely find one more cache before checking into our lodging.
By the time we found our room, the frozen dessert was soft enough that I could easily serve myself about half of the pint into a coffee cup with a plastic spoon. Either the next part was especially frozen or David was incredibly unlucky, but his first foray into the dessert with his plastic spoon resulted in three no-longer-usable parts of a spoon. He is happy to report that his portion tasted just fine with a fork.
Tomorrow we visit SeaTac, then will drive to Port Angeles and take a ferry to Victoria. The first “other” country that David and I will visit together, and the first international border crossing for either of us since the start of the pandemic.
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