Well, here we are in Vancouver. But, wait. If this is Vancouver, it must be Wednesday and that means I am a couple days behind. Now the hard part is remembering everything I wanted to write about the last couple of days. I believe when I left off, we were in Spokane, WA. At least I hope that is where I left off. Our Vancouver hotel does not have wireless access to the internet, and the wire is in what is now Sheila's bedroom.
As I was saying, we were in Spokane. The trip from Spokane to Seattle is fairly short by distance, but, once again, there was a lot to see, so it did take most all day. The geology west of Spokane was surprisingly flat, so we made good time right up to the Columbia river crossing. At that point the lay of the land changed abruptly to very hilly. The I-90 crossing over the Columbia was spectacular. We stopped at a scenic overlook just before the crossing and spent quite a bit of time just taking it in. If nothing else, the historic nature of the river made the stop worth while.
After crossing the Columbia the landscape got progressively hillier with many vantage points where we could see long distances across valleys and to the mountains in the distance. We were heading for Mt. Rainier, so we got off I-90 and followed a state highway to the mountain. Of course we had to stop at the first available road side stand and purchase copious amounts of sweet (aka. Bing) and Mt. Ranier cherries. We immediately started eating them on the way to the mountain.
We kept watching for the mountain because we wanted to see how far away it was visible from. As it turned out, there were too many other mountains between us and Rainier, and we were practically on it before we actually saw the upper part of the mountain. There were some clouds around the top that generally obscured the peak, but they shifted enough that we were able to get glimpses of the areas just below the peak and occasionally of the peak itself. Several times, we were able to see the top well enough to see the blue ice of a glacier. At 14,000+ feet, the top of the mountain is always pretty well covered with snow and ice. It turns out that there are 22 glaciers around the mountain. I did not know that until Sheila read it for us. Check out these pictures.
We drove up the south east side of the mountain to Sunrise Visitor's Center. Mt. Rainier is now a National Park which kind of surprised me. I last visited in the late 70s (that's 1970s kids) and I am sure it was not a National Park at that time. It was just a local / state ski and recreation area. Anyway, Sunrise Visitor's Center sits at about 6400 feet and is the highest point you can drive to. When we started up the road to the center, the temperature was about 84. When we got to the center, the temperature was about 64 and it was quite windy. We had an enjoyable time there taking lots of pictures and shopping. If we had more time it might have been nice to hike up a little further (maybe). Although I knew that Rainier is a volcano (as are all the mountains in the chain) I did not realize it is considered to be active. I don't know why that is as it is not venting steam or anything. I'll have to research that a bit. We did not see Mt. Saint Helens which is quite a bit south of Rainier. Now, that would be something since it is venting steam. In our drive up to the visitor's center (and back down) we did get the opportunity to see some interesting land and rock formations. To me, one of the most interesting was the rock formations where molten lava from a volcanic eruption had run into a glacier. The glacier was too thick for the lava to melt through so it piled up along the edge of the glacier. The result was a bunch of hexagonal shaped "columns" laying on top of each other. I hope the pictures show it better than I can describe it.
From Rainier, we headed on to Seattle. Our hotel was actually in Lynnwood, about 20 miles north of the city center. After moving in to our rooms at the hotel, we set out directly for downtown Seattle. We drove down past the Space Needle and onto a freeway that wouldn't let me get off at the piers where the restaurants are. Of course, when I do something like that, I get no end of grief from the 3 women in the car: Mary, Sheila and the navigation system person. It wasn't too bad though. I managed to get off and took some side streets through a very "industrial" sort of neighborhood, which didn't help my standing much with the aforementioned individuals. After some driving about, we were able to return to the restaurant area and specifically to Ivar's. Ivar's is a fairly famous seafood restaurant at the piers. We had a nice table there where we could watch the ferries come and go. The food was great, also!
The next day we pretty much slept in until around 8:00. After breakfast we headed down to the Space Needle. Unfortunately, the day had turned cloudy and foggy with occasional rain. In other words a normal Seattle day! We went up in the Space Needle, but were not really able to see very far. We could see all the main landmarks of Seattle itself. From there we took the monorail to downtown. Once downtown, we went directly to the Pike Place Market. Actually, we did stop at the little park at the North end of the market to enjoy the view and look over the totem poles. The Pike Place Market was another awesome adventure. For most of the nearly 3 block length of it, one side was almost all flower vendors. The other side was a variety of vendors with fresh fruit and vegetables, more cherries (yeah, I know that is a fruit, but it bears special mention), and seafood. At the south end is the City Fish Market (I think that is the correct name) that has become quite famous and attracts a lot of attention because of the way they fill customers orders. The do a call and response kind of thing then fling the selected item from the case back to the person who wraps it. I guess you gotta be there.
From there we went to an Irish pub for lunch. Sheila and Mary had Guinness there and I had water. Well, Mary did share hers with me. After lunch we did more walking around and shopping before heading back to the monorail for the trip back to the Space Needle. From there we went back to the hotel to rest a bit. We had reservations for 8:30 at the Sky City restaurant in the Space Needle. That is the one that revolves (or rotates I can never remember which is correct). Although the sky was overcast and we were not able to see any stars, we were able to see the cresent moon for a while, and, of course, we were able to watch the sunset and the lights of the city. It was a fantastic meal and well worth the trip back into the city.
This morning I took the car in for its 20,000 mile service. We turned that over just after we left Rainier on Monday. While the car was being serviced Mary and Sheila did a little shopping and got everything packed up so we were ready to load the car when I got back. By this morning it was rainy and misty pretty much all the time. We set off for Vancouver around 11:00. It is only about a two hour drive. On the way, we discovered that the navigation system does have data for Canada, so we were able to just put our hotel address in and let it guide us. It was a good thing, because we didn't have any good maps of British Columbia, and we didn't have directions to the city.
This has gotten to be a very long blog, so I will pick it up tomorrow with the Vancouver portion of our journey. Tomorrow is a pretty full day so there will be plenty to tell then.
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