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22-24 June: I found Seattle to be a different sort of place than and others I have visited. Surrounded by water, running up and down hills that make San Francisco look tame, and overgrown with green things and tall conifers, it is urban yet wild, sprawling, confusing in its layout, colorful, and teeming with tourists, shipping cranes, float planes, and tech business. Just outside the city limits I felt like taking a few steps off the road, catching a salmon from a creek, and roasting it on a cedar plank over a fire beside a giant fir tree dripping with moss, while eating handfuls of juicy wild berries. Instead we communed with the natural order of things in a different way, watching the annual solstice parade go by at the Gas Works Park. The park is a fantastic melding of rusted old petrochemical tanks and pipes surrounded by lush green lawns, overlooking the glass and steel spires of downtown just across blue water dotted with boats. The parade aspires to a similar theme, taking aim at the collision of industry and ecology. While suggesting with its improvised floats and marching bands that big industry is destroying the planet, its only proposal is that an appropriate way to counter this is to trade clothes for body paint and circle a hilltop sundial amid a cacophony of drums and horns. In the end we abandoned the crowded streets and sought refuge in an Irish pub in Kirkland where there is shuffleboard and a wonderful corned beef and cabbage potato crepe called a boxty. The next morning, at Pikes Place Market, I bought turkey eggs to settle two questions: 1) yes, eggs can go through airport security in carry-on bags, and 2) no, turkey eggs do not taste at all different from chicken eggs.
15 April: In Yosemite the waterfalls are roaring, the weather is perfect, the mosquitoes aren't out, and all the trees have their new leaves which are bright green and spotless, not even dusty yet. We went for the weekend and walked through the giant trees in upper Mariposa Grove on Friday, climbed to the top of Nevada Falls on Saturday, and walked up Tenaya Creek past Mirror Lake on Sunday morning. This was my third time staying in the cozy Lupin Cabin just outside the valley in the quiet community of Foresta, pleasantly away from the bustle of weekend visitors who crowd the roads and trails.
01 April: We went to Arizona for the weekend, flying to Tucson on Thursday night and returning from Phoenix on Sunday. On Friday we went to the excellent Desert Museum in Tucson, a botanical garden and zoo with desert animals like bobcats, foxes, a mountain lion, a wolf, bears, birds, and various cute smaller furry creatures as well as snakes, lizards, and fish. They irrigate the landscape enough to have a very good bloom of wildflowers within the gardens despite a lack of rain in the region. Although the winter has been dry we saw some flowers blooming in Saguaro National Park, which has some spectacular forests of tall saguaros. We ate tasty tamales, walked around downtown Tucson in the evening (lots of tattoo shops!), and saw the huge airplane boneyard and aviation museum with dozens of planes on display. It is mind boggling to think of all the engineering that went into each and every one of these now obsolete craft. In Phoenix on Sunday, we hiked Camelback Mtn with crowds of people and then retired to an ice cream shop with a pizza oven for a couple hours. I am glad to be home to cooler, wetter San Francisco!
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