Thursday 26 August: Seattle Visit

 Back in Seattle again - did a LOT of traveling in two days. LOVED Portland and meeting with Joe, April and Shandra :)

Back in Seattle, we went to the Pike Place Market and aside from the very amusing flying fish show and being introduced to some delicious cheese curds, I found a place that sold boerewors and bought me some.

Near the market I also bought a Rand McNally road atlas, just in case my American TomTom did not work as advertised. We also visited Debbie's work where I found a fellow South African expat, we spoke in Afrikaans and greatly enjoyed confounding the rest of the office!

Ate supper at the incomparable Melrose Grill, where we met up with islandgirl.

Debbie and her lovely son Franco

Washington State - Olympic (Hoh), Ruby's Beach and Portland

Some pictures.

awesome!








April and Shandra and Joe:

Wednesday 25 August: Portland

Heading to Portland, we visited the dreamy rainforest (I'll make a separate post with only these pics), the spooky Ruby's Beach (I'll make a post with only pics of Ruby's Beach) with swirling fog and skeletal driftwood, all part of the Olympic National Park. Part of the drive was boring with roadworks and delays. We often ended up behind logging trucks like this one:



Once it was rather exciting when we were following a truck that was losing part of it's load all over the road: I called 911 on Debbie's phone and spoke with the operator, telling the story, giving particulars including the licence plate number of the truck. When I got transferred to the state police to tell the entire story all over again, I became impatient and they said thanks they would take it from there.. and then the truck noticed it was shedding plywood like confetti and pulled off the road and that was that
All of this journey was impressively beautiful.

We arrived in Portland late in the afternoon -around sunset- and went off into Portland city with Shandra and April and Joe, the ladies had already picked up Joe earlier in the day. First we had a bite to eat, then we all got together at the fabulous book store Powell's City of Books. We saw a little bit of Portland, including Voodoo Doughnut. Then we took Joe back to the station to go back home. There was far too little time, we only had a few hours together! Went back home early where I flaked out again, on the couch (no staying power!)