Author: John Bassett

We slept nicely in our little cabin in the trees. One of the more unusual features here is the extra-long bath tub.

Our first stop of the day was the Saturday Market in Ganges. There are a number of crafts markets featuring the work of local artists in British Columbia, but this one is the biggest and most famous. Everything sold there is supposed to be “grown, cooked, or made” by the person selling it.

 

I did not really need pottery cups or hand-knitted pillow cases, but I was interested in some of the food stands. This gentleman was enthusiastically selling sprouts of all sorts and varieties. I have never much understood the appeal of this particular food, but we did buy some shitake mushrooms he was also selling.

 

There were a number of musicians and performance artists there as well.

We decided to take a look at the high-end accommodations on the island. The Hastings House looked lovely, but a stay there starts at 595 dollars a night! John read about a concert that will take place here tomorrow on the lawn overlooking the harbor, so we purchased a couple tickets to the event while we were here.

 

In the late afternoon, we decided to go to Ruckle Provincial Park on the southeast corner of the island. On the way there we went to a farm where sheep and goat cheeses are made. There was a little walk which you could look through windows into the rooms at the different steps of cheese making.

  

We bought about 250 grams of a nice, mild goat cheese. I think we’ll have grilled cheese sandwiches in the next couple days. Just outside the shop, they had the only sheep fountain I think I have ever seen.

Just down the road the sign for a farm stand. We pulled in, two large gates swung open, and we found ourselves right next to this almost finished house. The farm stand is just to the right in the picture below. As is typical on the island, the food stand is on the honor system with a money box where you can deposit your money and take change if you need it. We found it impossible to imagine anything like this in Los Angeles, which is, as one commentator once pointed out, is the home of  pay-before-you-pump gasoline. We saw a big garden nearby with a large tent, so we think that this farm really grows weddings. I think that this house is supposed to accommodate the bride and her family and friends on the night before.

 

Ruckle Park was pretty crowded and had the most restrictive dog policies of any government park we have found in BC so far. The prolonged period of warm, dry weather has raised concerns about forest fires and water shortages, but it is has certainly brought out the campers.

 

So we went to another little cove at the end of Beddis Road. There were also lots of people here, but nobody at the far end of the beach. Here we tossed the ball into the water and Eli had a great time retrieving it. Edie still doesn’t understand what he sees in that stupid tennis ball.

We woke up a little earlier than usual, though were it the September we’d still be late for school, had our breakfast and packed. Marian helped us get our things to to the top of the hill since her Kia has 4 wheel drive. We were not sure how many people would be trying to get on the ferry, so we followed the standard advice to be there at least half an hour early. As it turned out, we were the second in the line and we had plenty of time to walk around and explore the Lyall Harbour dock. The dogs do not like gangways, but they like sitting in the car even less so they gamely walked around with us.

 

We had to take two ferries today. First, we had to go to Mayne Island. At Mayne, we needed to transfer ships and take another ferry to Salt Spring Island. The fare for all of this, car and passengers, was only 20 dollars. It must be seriously subsidized! The first ship was called the Queen of Cumberland. All BC Ferries seem to have “Queen” as part of their title. This nod to the Royal Family seems a particularly odd in British Columbia where so few people seem to be English. The Queen of Cumberland was a clean, quiet, and virtually empty. John and I wandered around the deck and sat in the lounge. It seemed like we were on a cruise ship as we passed through the gorgeous archipelago.

At Mayne we disembarked and moved the car to the transfer line. Again, there was only one car ahead of us, and there was nobody behind us. We talked to a women from BC Ferries who told us that the second ship was not scheduled to come for about an hour, and would no doubt be later than than because it was running late from its previous port. A man at the snack shop there told us that there was a beach right next to the pier. We walked down, and found a lovely little cove which we had all to ourselves. The dogs played around, and Eli had his usual fun chasing his tennis ball.

Since it was close to noon, we broke out the food and I made sandwiches for both of us. I read John a chapter from Tent of Blue. This is the novel I mentioned before that the waitress at the Pub had written. So far, I like it.

We saw a family of river otter swimming just off the beach. The young ones were chasing each other. You can vaguely seem them just above the rocks in the middle of the picture. Oh, to have a telephoto lens handy!

Our second ship definitely had more people on it and somehow did not seem quite as posh. We spent most of our time on deck since it was a warm, sunny day, and as we came in to Salt Spring we saw dozens of sail boats.

Thanks to Daniel, our GPS, we made it to our new place. Salt Spring seemed huge after Saturna. We actually had some traffic and maybe even a red light. We drove through Ganges, the main town, and found our way to the Happinest Cottage. The young couple who run this place would also be right at home in Arcata or Bolinas. He is a rolfer, she a massage therapist. They’re quite sweet, and since Salt Spring is famous as a bit of an old hippy hangout, the Happinest Cottage is the perfect place to stay here, particularly if you have dogs. It is not a fancy place, but it has a bed, a nice bath, a full kitchen, and a porch. You can kind of hear the road in the distance, but mostly it feels deep in the woods.

Forgive the silly expression, but I think both the dogs and I were tired of getting pictures snapped by this point. The photo, however, gives a sense of the interior.

 

The wireless was not working at first so Bruce, our host, came up to fix it. His three year old daughter Juniper came with him. She was fascinated by the dogs, particularly Edie. Edie was tired, but she was gracious about the nonstop attention.

 

We decided to explore the island a little further while Bruce talked to the cable company to figure out what needed to be plugged in where. We went down to the tourist information office in Ganges. The people there were really friendly and helpful. They recommended Duck Creek Park as a good place where people let the dogs roam off-leash. I don’t know if it is really an old-growth area or not, but it had the feel of serious rainforest. There was not that much water in the creek as we are in a drought now in BC. Still, you can tell that it does rain a little here!

In the evening, I did some laundry. After wi-fi, a washing machine is my favorite vacation amenity! I also cooked some lamb sausage and gnocchi with goat cheese for our dinner.

Tomorrow, we go to the famous Salt Spring Saturday Market.

Today was slightly cloudy for much of the day, and at times it was downright chilly. Since most of the United States is suffering from record-breaking heat this summer, I suppose we should not complain.

We had a slow start to the morning. We slept in and had a leisurely breakfast. Finally, we decided to take another walk along our rocky shoreline. The dogs met a friendly Labrador retriever along the way, and we talked to her owners, a young couple from Victoria. His family had owned a place here on Saturna since the mid 1960’s. We mentioned the whales we saw the other night, and he admitted that this was only the second time in all those years he had seen orcas in this channel. John turned to me and said, “You are very great!” It’s an inside joke. Years ago, in Kenya, when we had seen a lion devour a wildebeest, our guide tried to tell us how lucky we were to see this. But his English was a little uncertain so what he actually said was, “You are very great!” Indeed, we are very great.

 

Not everybody is lucky – or great – enough to afford one of the large homes along the edge of this island. Still, Saturna  is spacious and tolerant enough to allow some people of quite moderate means to live here, even if their housing is pretty basic.

All this walking and talking had us a little hungry, so we decided to explore the island’s other restaurant – remember, there are only two of them – attached to the pub near the ferry dock. We had a lovely meal here. John had calamari and I had the Baa Baa Burger, the closest I could come to participating in Saturna’s biggest event of the year, the July 1 Lamb BBQ. We chatted up our waitress and discovered that she is a published author. Here first novel, which we bought in the nearby general store/tackle shop/marine supplies shop/bookstore, is available on Amazon.ca and received good reviews from the Globe and Mail.

 

Everybody on this island is underemployed if employed at all. Years ago, when I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I decided that scenery was not worth the loss of a meaningful job. I still think I made the right decision for me, but I accept that other people may come to a different decision.

There is certainly amazing scenery in this part of the world. After leaving the cafe, we drove to the highest point on the island, Mount Warburton Pike. From here there are views across the Straight to Pender, Salt Spring, and the other Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island in the distance. You can also see down across the Strait of Juan de Fuca into the San Juan islands of Washington State and apparently even the Olympic Range on clear days. It was not quite that clear for us, but the views were still jaw-dropping.

We went again to East Point to see if we could be “great” again and see whales. We did not, but we found this young seal on the shoreline. He did not seem all that energetic, so I am not sure that he was well. I kept Edie tightly under control so that she did not try to investigate too closely.

 

Our host had also told us about an amazing, isolated beach at the bottom on a steep cliff near East Point. We found it, but somehow we did not feel like scrambling down and up the steep hillsides, especially when it was approaching early evening and getting almost chilly.

We finished off the day eating leftover chicken and watching a movie on the iPad. Tomorrow, on to Salt Spring Island. With its 10,000 residents, this should be like Manhattan after Saturna!

Today we explored the island, had a couple wonderful adventures and also a mishap along the way. It was definitely low tide when we woke up, and we could walk out for a ways on the reef in front of the house. We snapped a picture of it from the water’s edge. As you can see, there is the larger home on the right – that’s Marian’s personal house – and on the right is the small cottage where we are staying. Marian and Buddha went to Vancouver for a couple days so we have the deck to ourselves.

This is the inside of our cottage, a picture John obviously did not take from the beach, showing the kitchen and the living area with the bedroom just off behind the door.  I would not want things to white at home, but at the seaside in the summer it seems like the perfect color.

Back along the reef, we saw lots of mussels and there were also lots of starfish. 

As we walked along we could hear the high-pitched sounds of young eagles, though we did not see any aeries.

We packed up the car and decided to head to the island’s biggest tourist draw – and one of its two restaurants – the Saturna Island Family Winery. Here we had our only real trouble of the day. As we were coming to our cottage yesterday, we went down of fairly steep hill covered with gravel. When we turned the corner on the road to go up it, the wheels of the car started spinning wildly in the gravel. One by one, all of the neighbors came out with various thoughts about the situation, all delivered kindly in that slow, Canadian cadence. “No four-wheel drive, eh?” observed one older man. “We all have four wheel drive here.” A gray-haired lady came out with a rake and we tried to rake out as much of the rocks as we could. It didn’t help much. Finally, one younger man told John just to reverse to the bottom of the hill and try it as fast is he could, veering from side to side. The two older people thought this dangerous and shook their heads, but John gave it a try. It sent up a dust cloud about as big as a 1950’s nuclear test, but we did make it to the top of the hill. We’re now parking it on the road. I am not sure that is legal, but the police only come to the island once or week or when somebody reports a problem.

Once safely on the road, we made it to the vineyard with no problem. It is stunning located on the other coast of the small island with fields nestled between a steep escarpment and the placid waters of Plumper Sound.

There are about ten tables set up on the patio outside the wine tasting room. The dogs were welcome to join us at our table. This being Saturna, everybody was friendly and as we walked up the people at this table called us over and talked to us. They were as fun as the group on the ferry.

It was a birthday celebration, I guess, and the guest of honor had found a sash for the occasion. She announced that she was Miss Las Vegas of 1936.

Talking to them some more, we learned that every last one of the group were retired teachers or administrators. None of them seemed to have any regrets about leaving their service in the Vancouver area schools behind them. One of the men had been a high school principal. He now devoted his time whenever possible to fly fishing, and he had a series of tattoos now, each commemorating a  big summer fly fishing adventure.

We had a charcuterie platter and our new friends bought us a bottle of Pinot Noir to go with it. It was the closest thing I think you can find in Canada to sitting in a Tuscan vineyard. Of course, in Tuscany you don’t get a water view.

Speaking of water, after we ate, we walked down to the cove. We did not have a tennis ball with us, but it turned out that Eli was quite happy to chase after a piece of bull kelp.  John had his trunks on, and he finally took a plunge into the cold water. He found a swing attached to an old pine tree at the waters edge.

 

There were lots of plants in bloom, and one of them gave me a one of the world allergy attacks I have had in years. John, who suffers from allergies more than I do, had some super-prescription stuff back at the cottage, so we drove back there so I could get some relief from sneezing and itchy eyes.

 

We watched for whales, but today there were none to be seen. So as late afternoon turned into early evening, we went three miles down the road to East Point, the tip of the island. The evening was clear, and we could see the glaciers on Mount Baker in Washington as well as other snowcapped Canadian peaks. East Point, with its grassy fields and granite cliffs, looks a great deal like the coast of Maine. The old barn there, now carefully restored with new cedar shingles, completes the Down East scene.

Edie loved it there. I cannot imagine Andrew Wyeth painting pictures of dogs, but he if had, this could have been his scene.

 

Back at the cottage, I roasted a chicken and some ears of corn on the grill. John made a salad, and we ate as we watched the sun sink bright red below the horizon at about 9:30.

We met a woman from England years ago who told us about a trip she  took to La Jolla. She booked a room at a fancy beachfront hotel. The bell boy took here up to her room, opened the doors to the balcony, and proudly proclaimed, “Some days you can see whales from here.” Our friend was incredulous. “Wales?” she said. “From here?”

Well, we saw whales from here. But we’ll talk more about this later.

We spent a lot of time traveling today by both car and boat. After packing up our West End apartment, we went down to the Granville Public Market where we bought some provision for our trip to Saturna. We nearly had a minor disaster when John drove off with the camera on the roof of the car, but fortunately it did not fall off when he remembered that a few feet later. We did some more shopping for things like dog food at a regular supermarket near the ferry terminal in the town of Tsawwassen. We arrived at the ferry terminal a little late, but since I had made a reservation some weeks ago we still were able to board to 12:00 pm ferry to Swartz Bay. The BC Ferry system is not easy to understand, and for some reason it is nearly impossible to go to most of the Southern Gulf Islands without going all the way to Vancouver Island first. And that’s what we did. On the first trip, John and I paid 10 bucks each for the first class lounge which had free coffee, snacks, newspapers, internet, and no children. Worth every penny….

On the second ferry trip, however, from Swartz Bay to Lyall Harbour did not have these fancy amenities, so we spent the time on deck. This was fun because we started to meet some of the locals. They are friendly, amusing – and a little wild!  Suzie, the woman on the left, pulled off her shirt to sunbathe in her bra after John removed  his shirt. She did have the sense to cover up a bit when John then  pulled out his camera.  She has written a number of things including a published  memoir about growing up Jewish in Palo Alto in the 1950’s. (Apparently it was quite a goyische place back then.) The woman whose back it turned to us is married to the island’s only plumber – who also holds a couple degrees in physics from Berkeley.

 

We were met at the ferry dock by Marian, our landlady. Our cottage here on Saturna is really a small second house right next to hers. The houses two share a common deck. Originally from Liverpool, Marian is smart, funny, and quite pretty:  the picture below, with the shadows of late afternoon, is not a good one, but it was the best I had on the card.

 

She has the most adorable pug named Buddha. He is not at all a shy boy and he dropped in to visit with Edie and Eli and made himself quite at home.

We had not been here more than a half hour when Marian excited called out, “Whales!” Saturna, the southernmost of the Gulf Islands, is well-known as the best place in BC for watching whales on land, but the pod of orcas which came by was close even by island standards. About a dozen swam about 500 feet off-shore from us. It’s hard to have the camera ready when a whale decides to jump out of the water, so the best we could do was this picture of a head.

 

As afternoon turned to twilight, John went walking through this most rural of all the islands. There are only about 350 full-time residents of Saturna, and over half the island is national park. There are plenty of deer around, and Edie was fascinated by this buck.

Tomorrow, we will start exploring the island.

We got a late start today. I guess our little West End apartment is so quiet that I could sleep in for once, and I did not get up until after nine o’clock! I am not sure I have ever slept so late unless I just had a flight from Asia the day before. John decided to go to the gym – a free pass was included with our rental – and I stayed with the dogs and worked on editing photos. The great thing about digital cameras is since you are not paying for film you think nothing of taking 120 pictures or more in a day. The bad part is that you have to go through and make some choices and delete them or else your hard drive is full before you know it.

Around noon, we piled the dogs in the car and went downtown, parking near Canada Place, the 1986 World’s Fair building which became the Vancouver convention center and a cruise ship terminal. It is not particularly dog-friendly, so we did not go in there. Instead, armed with a few pages from a walking tour I found on the Internet, we wandered through the streets of downtown Vancouver. It did not take that long to see the sights there because there is not much really great architecture in the central business district. It tends to be functional and dull, much like the office towers that Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill built all over San Francisco in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  It is  not Chicago. Vancouver is saved, however, by the sheer beauty of its natural setting.

We did have a walking tour planned for two o’clock of the Gastown District. We were late and were afraid that we had missed the tour. As it turned out, the tour guide never did show. But we had a pleasant time chatting with some of our fellow would-be tourists including these red hat ladies. I was only vaguely aware of the Red Hat Society movement from an episode of The Simpsons. I did not realize until I came home and did a Google search that there are thousands of women who wear red hats and purple dresses and decide to go out and have a good time together. They were fun, and made me yearn for the heyday of the ECW where I always used to find these ladies.

This old girl was our favorite. The glasses are the best.

Once we figured out that the tour was not happening, we all went our separate ways. John and I looked around Gastown. It is the original settlement on the north shore of the peninsula, and its name has nothing to do with gas lighting. Instead, it is named after saloon keeper Jack Deighton who was called “Gassy Jack” because of his predilection for telling long and involved stories.   There is no doubt a lot of interesting Victorian history here that we missed by not going on the tour. All that you see as you walk through the area is a collection of tee shirt shops and other tourist traps. I think that this serves as a place for cruise ship passengers leaving from Canada Place to wander around until the boat is ready to leave. The “steam clock” is shown below. I could not figure out if this was really historical or just another faux bit.

We went on to the Vancouver Art Gallery after this. Originally the British Columbia Law Courts building, this was converted in the 1970’s to be a modern art museum when the new court buildings were built nearby. I found the various installations to be pretty dull; I think John had a better time here.

 

We went south to the VanDusen Botanical Gardens. We intended to stay a little longer here because there was no “No Pets” policy on their website. But when we arrived we were greeted with a “Guide Dogs Only” sign. So we did a quick walk through, feeling guilty about leaving the dogs in the car already while we were at the museum. It was pretty, though nothing compared with our trip to Wisley in Surrey.

This little family politely almost seemed to pose for us.

There was a Korean garden here, and it was quite lovely. I wish the concept of Korean gardening was a little more apparent to my Korean neighbors who seem to favor concrete paving as their landscaping of choice.

Today we did find the dog beach that we missed yesterday. And it turned out that it is huge, stretching nearly a mile along the south bank of the English Bay near Pacific Spirit Park. The dogs did have a good time here.

Our final stop of the morning was a bit off the tourist trail. I had read about Commercial Drive and was a little intrigued to explore it. Commercial Drive is the last bastion of the counterculture in Vancouver. It proudly has no chain stores or restaurants. It has coffee shops which proclaimed that they are “Worker Owned!” and you can buy your books at the “People’s Book Co-op”. It just brings back warm memories of Berkeley or Ann Arbor in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  We found this band rehearsing in a small park just off the street. They were playing something with a bit of a Caribbean feel to it, though I do not usually associate tubas and euphoniums with the islands, mon….

Part of the band were  a group of counter culture red hat ladies. Instead of purple dresses and red hats, however, they favored parasols which they twirled and danced with as the band played. They were fun!

All of this attracted a small crowd including this young visitor for England. She was enchanted by the dogs, particularly Edie.

Edie liked her new friend and loved to watch the ladies dancing and twirling their parasols.

We had dinner at Havana, a great little restaurant there on “The Drive”. I had some amazing tostones and ropa vieja, all washed down with some local lager. A pleasant end to a pleasant day.

After our long walk through the park yesterday, humans and dogs slept quite well in our West End apartment. We are on the right on the ground floor. I sort of wish we were up a floor, but as I have said, you make compromises when you are traveling with two animals the size of a Shetland Pony.

 

After a bite of breakfast, I went off to Eucharist at nearby Christ Church Cathedral. It is not an imposing building, but it is located on a particularly grand section of Burrard Street right across from Tiffany’s. The Anglican Church of Canada is supposed to be in a great decline, but there were very few empty seats at this service. The music was provided by a visiting choir from Taiwan who did well with the Chinese language selections, and had some trouble with hitting the the high notes with those English vowels.

After I came back – John had taken the dogs to frolic in the local off-leash park – we headed off to Granville Island. This is an recreation and shopping district which was created in an old industrial zone on the shore of False Creek, just south of downtown. There is still a little bit of manufacturing going on, but it mostly consists of restaurants and small boutique shops. There are lots of open spaces for performers, and on a warm Sunday like today, there were lots of performers. We watched a Japanese dance show, a Spanish guitarist, and a French cafe chanteur. This is the island, lying under the Granville Street Bridge, as seen from the Burrard Street Bridge.

At first, both John and I saw this as another tourist attraction, even if one which is environmentally aware, much like Pier 39 in San Francisco or South Street Seaport in New York. But what sets Granville Island apart, what makes it a draw for locals as well, is the Public Market on the Island. The numerous stalls here sell every kind of fish, meat, vegetable, fruit, and cheese imaginable, all of it fresh, and much of it local.

Our only disappointment of the day came when tried to locate the off-leash dog park at Spanish Bank park. The beaches which stretch along the south coast of English Bay are quite lovely, but the one stretch of it which is supposedly OK for canines is NOT at all well-marked. But as we went along looking for it, we did see some of the nicest neighborhoods in Vancouver. 

We  went back to the apartment and gave the dogs their dinner. We then went back to the shores of False Creek to see Much Ado About Nothing at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival. The plays here are performed in tents just on the shore. The back of each tent, where the stage is located, if opened to show the mountains of North Vancouver and the ships passing by in the bay. Nature becomes the ultimate backdrop.

 

It was a good production of the play. All the Shakespeare comedies are problematic for modern audiences – The Merchant of Venice in particular – and this one, with its obsessive focus on Hero’s virginity and Beatrice’s ultimate submission of Benedick, could be upsetting if taken too seriously. Fortunately, the director kept it sort of frothy with an odd mixture of Edwardian-era costumes and flamenco dancing. The main actors were quite good, even if the woman who played Beatrice looked and sounded exactly like Katherine Hepburn.

We wandered home as the sunset turned the condominium towers of Yaletown into magical pillars of glass and light against a the twilight sky.

After waking up in our fancy hotel room, we decided to go out for a cup of coffee and something for breakfast. We walked through our downtown Seattle neighborhood. There are lots of new high-rise apartment buildings here, and our guide yesterday referred to this as the “Vancouverization” of Seattle. It’s mostly good, I suppose, but the architecture is dull that even the efforts to create a pedestrian friendly streetscape with shops still cannot overcome a profound urban sterility.

However, one bit of art had an effect. Edie was really upset when she saw the dog in front of this building. She barked at it, tried to engage it in play, and only when I came and touched it and it did not move did she figure out it was a statue. Eli did not respond, but then there are times when I wonder if a brain scan would reveal much activity there.

The Seattle Art Museum, courtesy of Bill and Melinda Gates, has a downtown statue park just off Alaskan Way. The art is the usual stuff, but there are trails for bikes and walkers. There’s also an outside amphitheater which attracted an early morning yoga crowd. I thought of registering Edie so she could show them a real downward dog, but I let that thought pass….

Instead, we just continued on walking.

We returned to  the Seattle Center where the Bite of Seattle was getting started again. These “Taste of…” events used to have real restaurants there, but now they seem to just attract people who do food at street fairs. I suppose in the era of Yelp! and Urban Spoon restaurants do not need to get noticed in the way they did before the internet, and it is probably pretty expensive to set up shop for a day anyhow. But among these vendors, there was one which attracted our attention for the sheer inventiveness of their food truck. What you can’t make out in the photograph, however, is the Washington license plate:  SOMEPIG. I do not know whether E. B. White would have approved or not.

As I noted yesterday, the music fare, despite the reputation of Seattle for being a hotbed of cool indie bands, consisted largely of groups which might have a hard time getting a bar gig in Canton, Ohio. But there were some other attractions such as this “Dock Dogs” competition. Here’s how it worked. The handler threw a tennis ball or something like it into the pool and you get to see how far the dog can jump.

I found a cool spot to observe this right next to an iconic Frank Gehry building, but the dogs still minimal interest in watching. So we did not stay that long.

 

So we went back to the hotel, packed up, and headed towards Canada. Our trip went quickly, and we did not have too long a wait at the border. Still, it seemed odd to even wait at all remember the days when we could just drive over the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, have lunch there, and drive back again without anybody even seeming to notice your car in the guard booth. BC is not shy about boosting itself.

Of course, the problem with calling yourself the “Best Place on Earth” is that everybody might move there and then it would not be the Best Place on Earth anymore, would it?

We found our West End apartment and settled in. It is nice, though it is the basement unit. We have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room, and one of those rooms with the really great white dog water bowl in it. The neighborhood could not be more centrally-located.

The weather was perfect, so we headed down towards English Bay to walk along the seawall. Along the way we came across this public art installation by a Chinese sculptor. I am not sure that it is great art, but everybody seemed to think is was the perfect place to have somebody take your picture. And who are we to disagree with that?

The weather was perfect:  sunny, clear, and probably about 78 degrees. The beaches were packed and those who did not have swim trunks on were at least working on their tans. Again, John decided to “go native”.

For those who did not want to venture into the Bay, the city had build an enormous heated saltwater pool right on the beach. The pool’s capacity is nearly 3000 people!

We continued on into Stanley Park. Our new GPS unit, replacing the old one which was dying and was no longer supported by the manufacturer, is so small that it fits into your pocket. It has a pedestrian mode, too, and we used it to guide us as we wandered through the park. Stanley Park is huge, and once you get away from the main roads and paths, you scarcely ever see another person. You could get seriously lost in there, so the GPS was a great help.

The Lost Lagoon at the entrance to the Park – which was our exit from it yesterday – has lovely views of the mountains to the north and the city to the southeast.

 

We explored the Davie Street area for dinner. Tomorrow, on to Granville Island, Kitsilano, and Shakespeare on the Beach. 

The beautiful weather we had yesterday disappeared under a layer of clouds today and the whole uncertainty about where were were going to spend the night seemed to give a kind of emotional grayness to the day as well. Fortunately, both the actual clouds and the metaphorical clouds parted by the afternoon and we ended the day quite happily.

We had breakfast and packed up our stuff at the University Inn. We headed downtown where I had arranged a walking tour of Seattle. Our guide was Jae, the man carrying the sign under his arm. He had been recently laid off from a software business, and he decided to start doing walking tours while he was looking for another job. We liked him:  he was personable and knew a lot about the history of the city. Plus, since he had only started recently, our group was much smaller than the usual established commercial tours. He was quite happy to have the dogs come along with us, and I am happy to say that they were perfectly behaved.

We saw all the usual downtown sights including Pike’s Place Market.

We did see a couple of more unusual sights, too. A performance artist dressed in nineteenth century clothes is reading aloud the whole of War and Peace. However, she only reads it when she has someone who will walk next to her. Otherwise she simply paces back and forth accompanied by a harpist. She’s been at this for months, and she may be there a year before she finishes the book.

We had a takeout lunch from Paseo Caribbean in Fremont. This is the favorite restaurant in Seattle in TripAdvisor and I think it gets the top rating from Yelp! I suspect part of the charm is that it is pretty cheap, but the Cuban-style food was quite good. We took the dogs to the beach at Warren Magnuson Park. This dog park was a bit disappointing after reading all the hype about how it is one of the finest in the nation. The stretch of “beach” – rocky shore, really – on Lake Washington is tiny and much of the rest of it is just a field of wood chips. We did not stay that long. Unfortunately, with road construction and the awful Seattle traffic, it took us a long time to get there and back even though it was only a few miles.  

By afternoon, we had been contacted by the Maxwell Hotel, the place which turned us away yesterday, and the offered us a room for the night. We had to pay, of course, but they offered us their best room for the price of a standard one. We readily agreed to this, and in late afternoon, just as the sun was finally breaking through the clouds,  we checked in.

We did not stay in our room that long, however, because the Bite of Seattle was taking place in the Seattle Center across the street from us. The Seattle Center is the site of the 1962 World’s Fair, and it is home to the iconic Space Needle. This free event had lots of restaurants hawking small samples of their menus and bands playing on a couple of stages. It was not the best example of this kind of “Taste of…” event that I have ever seen, and it was tiny compared the the one in Chicago. But it was pleasant enough to sit on the grass and eat even if the bands were barely up to doing covers of 80’s songs.

We had already bought tickets to the Seattle Children’s Theatre for the evening. This is also located in the Seattle Center. On our way to the theater we found this enterprising child juggling with a hat out for donations.

 

The Seattle Children’s Theatre is one of  only a couple professional companies which do work for young people. We were a bit disappointed when we discovered that during the summer the focus changes from performing for children to having children perform, and so the two plays were basically summer program productions. As such, they were pretty good. Both plays were adaptations of Roald Dahl stories: The B.F.G. and The Witches. I have never understood why anybody liked The B.F.G. though I know people who claim that this is their favorite Dahl story. I love The Witches, and I think they did a credible job of trying to translate this very untheatrical story to the theater.

We wandered back to the hotel, sprung the dogs, and walked back through the park as the sun went down. There was a skate park there and we had a good time watching some of the kids do their moves.

Tomorrow, on to Vancouver.

We had a lovely day of touring through the inlets and bays of the Puget Sound today until like a tsunami a disaster from far away struck us in Seattle. But I will explain more about that in time.

We awoke reasonably early and I took the dogs for a little stroll in the area just around the hotel. While the waterfront of Gig Harbor is charming, our hotel was located about a half mile inland right on the freeway. The area around it was not so charming, but there were a few patches of grass and that was all my friends really needed. After a quick trip to the hotel breakfast bar, we were on our way. Our plan for the day was to wander through different sights on the Kitsap Peninsula, cross over to Bainbridge Island, and then to take the ferry straight to downtown Seattle.

Our first stop was Scenic Beach State Park. I have to say that this park’s odd name is certainly warranted:  the only real reason to go there is look across the Hood Canal as the wonderful snowcapped peaks of the Olympic Mountains. Our day was perfect for this. It was cool and crisp and the mountains seemed close enough to touch.

Dogs, as I have noted, do not seem to care much about dramatic scenery. But there was a lot of stuff on that rocky beach which they did find fascinating. There was some seaweed, always good for rolling in, and there were lots and lots of oyster shells, or, as they would describe the “deliciously stinky white rocks.” There were also a few jellyfishes which had been left behind after high tide, but dogs had enough sense to not get too interested here.

Our next stop was Poulsbo. Like Solvang, California, Poulsbo is one of those towns which survived by embracing its ethnic heritage. In this case, the town calls itself “Little Norway” and the shops and bakeries which line Front Street serve up nostalgia warm and sweet each day.

Not being Norwegian, not wanting to buy tee shirts, and dragging around two large dogs, we were not perhaps the ideal visitors to Poulsbo, even if we had just watched I Remember Mama recently. So John, ever eager for a bit of an adventure hit on a different way to explore this part of the Puget Sound. We rented a powerboat.  

There are not many days in the Pacific Northwest when it is warm and sunny enough that having an old-fashioned powerboat must seem like the perfect idea, but this was one of them. It was about 80 in Poulsbo and the cool breeze created by making pushing the engine as hard as possible felt wonderful. Edie did not like boats when we first introduced her to them a few years ago, but now she loves them. She spent most of our 90 minutes on the water right in the bow as if she were our canine figurehead. When were were going a little slower, like we were in the picture below, she would turn around as if to say, “Hey. Speed this thing up a little, won’t you?”

 

After our ride, we had coffee and some of those Norwegian bake shop items. It would be wrong not to sample the local cuisine, right? We then went off towards Bainbridge Island. We stopped briefly at a tiny state park which was supposed to be the site of Chief Seattle longhouse. Well, there was nothing there now, and we only lingered for a few moments.

Once on Bainbridge Island, we went to Fay Bainbridge State Park. The dogs adored this and played in the shallow water and the seaweed. They seemed completely indifferent to Mount Rainier almost seeming to float above the land.

There is a wrong way and a right way to come into Seattle. The wrong way is to drive up Highway 5 past Tacoma and the airport. The traffic is awful and it is not particularly attractive. The right way is to come on the Bainbridge Island ferry which slowly carries you across the Puget Sound to a miniature Manhattan. With each minute the cities grows larger and large until you are close enough to nearly see people in the windows.

Of course, if you arrive at afternoon rush hour, as we did, the spell is broken by the slow Seattle traffic. But it’s still the best way to come.

Tsunamis carry the destruction of a far away earthquake across the globe. Well, in Seattle we felt the destruction of the Irish banking collapse. We had made reservations at the Maxwell Hotel by the Seattle Center. It is a new hotel, it takes dogs, and it was offering a variety of really good rates to establish itself in the city. We did the usual internet search for the best deal, and it 1-800-Hotels offered a slightly better price than Expedia or Travelocity. I went in to register and was told that they did not have a registration for us. I pulled out my 1-800 Hotels voucher to show them that indeed I did have a reservation. That was when the manager appeared and explained that 1-800 Hotels had declared bankruptcy and all the reservations made through it were cancelled. She was sorry but they had no rooms and hoped we had luck getting our money back. She was willing to make a few phone calls to see if they could find us something at one of their “sister properties”, and she did find us a place for one night.

Stuck in traffic on the way to the new hotel, I pulled out the iPad and did a quick Google search. It turns out that 1-800-Hotels is based in Dublin, and its creditors, uncertain of its bank balance, demanded immediate payment for all its accounts or it would cancel them. The internet travel service went to Bankruptcy Court to prevent them from doing this, but that injunction apparently came too late for us and for thousands of other travelers around the globe. We are staying tonight at the University Inn near the campus. I have no idea where we will be tomorrow night. Maybe sleeping in the car. Probably not….

Tomorrow, we have a full day of activities in Seattle planned. I guess checking for another place to stay will be one of them. I’ll keep you posted.