SEATTLE WEEKEND

This was our first ‘free’ weekend in seemingly months.  A weekend with no projects, no obligations, no travel.  A weekend of staying put. 

 

The first order of Saturday was to take a walk.  Our 3 mile loop starts at the marina, goes under the train tracks then winds up through the Sunset Hills neighborhood overlooking the Marina and Puget Sound.  There’s a wonderful park with huge views of the sound. 

 

 

 

The sailboats in the picture are from the second annual ‘Race Your House’ sailboat race.  The only qualification for the race is you need to be a bonafide liveaboard. 

 

We thought about participating it the race, but there were several pre-events and it was just too much given Jodi’s travel and it would have added a large planned event into an otherwise delightfully blank slate weekend.

 

Back to the walk.  After the park there’s a strategically located coffee shop.  Gotta love these urban walks.  There were no such amenities on the Preston Trail. 

 

Then comes the stairs.  100 stairs.  Steep stairs.  Trip and risk your life steep.  Fortunately there’s a good rail down the entire length.  Back under the train tracks and at the Marina. 

 

We did see another regatta, this one was an ‘Opti’ race.  An Opti is an 8 foot sailing dinghy usually sailed by kids.  It was great seeing a 6 year old, complete with mini foulweather gear and a professional looking life jacket.  At 6 this kid looked very competent as skipper of his racing machine.  We saw some Oregon sailing clubs that had brought their boats and young sailers to the regatta. 

 

We did have a couple of chores after the walk, but the evening’s event was a visit to Seattle’s underground.  The Underground Tour.

 

 

 

There’s quite a bit to the story, so I’ll need to paraphrase.  Much of Seattle’s Pioneer Square area was originally swamp land at or below sea level.  The only thing going for it was an ever optimistic functioning alcoholic who happened to be the town Doctor and early Seattle promoter. 

 

 

 

Doc Maynard.  It wasn’t mentioned during the tour, but legend has it Doc Maynard swindled the swamp land from Arthur Denny during a tooth extraction and Denny obligingly agreed to the transaction while under the influence of opium administered by the good Doc.

 

In any case, the original pioneer square area was built on a landfill of largely sawdust and in the 1880’s was home to 2,500 or so alleged seamstresses in a town otherwise dominated by a much larger number of male lumberjacks.  It was said these 2500 self proclaimed seamstresses collectively owned something like 7 sewing machines and the principle color they all seemed to like was red.  So it was called the red light district.

 

At the same time, the flush toilet plays into the story.  It seems that Seattle’s first attemp at a sewer system didn’t anticipate population growth on the hills above Pioneer Square and at high tide the pressure of the #2 coming down the hill was exceeded by the backpressure of the high tide, the level of which was still above much of Pioneer Square.  Apparently if you lived in Pioneer Square and flushed during a high tide there was a great risk of far more poop exploding up through the toilet than disappearing down the normal route.

 

Which lead to the tide tables being published on the front page of the local papers.

 

 

 

 

Then in 1889, a single event altered the course of Seattle.  While the single paid fireman was out of town in San Francisco learning fire fighting techniques, a young assistant was boiling glue.  Seems he was distracted (by one of the 2500 seamstresses?) and the glue boiled over into some turpentine soaked rags.  Fire erupted and spread to the paint store immediately above the glue shop.  This in a town with no brick structures and wooden houses and shops by the hundreds built side by side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In relative short order, much of Seattle was completely destroyed.  The ever optimistic city founders set at once correcting the level of Pioneer square by building the streets 12 to 24 feet above their former elevation and for a while townsfolks needed ladders to cross the streets.

 

One by one the shop owners raised their businesses to street level leaving a fascinating rabbit warren like area beneath Seattle.  Giving rise to Seattle’s underground tour.

 

The tour guides package all the information with a humorous twist.  Unknown to us, there are at least 2 tours.  The ‘family’ tour, which was the one we were on, and the ‘adult’ tour which is probably quite a bit of fun.  

 

It was a fun evening with dinner at ‘Place Pigalle’ in the market.

 

 

 

We should have hiked Sunday, but by the time we got ourselves up and going it was too late.  We had a late breakfast at Vula’s Offshore Café.   Dad and his buddies ate here often after crew practice.  Nearly 20 years later the pictures of the Ancient Mariners, Classic Ancient Mariners (CLAMS) and Really Ancient Mariners (RAMS) still hang on the wall. 

 

 

 

Dad once told me of quite a stretch where they couldn’t row because of fog.  Day after day they’d get up before 5 am only to find out it was too foggy to row (their coxwain was mostly blind, so it was prudent not to get out on the water).  Day after day they’d not row and end up at Vula’s for breakfast.  So the RAMS became the RAMBO’s.  The Really Ancient Mariners Breakfast Organization.

 

 

 

The current crew of the Ancient Mariners still gather in the morning after practice and over the years they have earned quite a reputation.  The guy at Vula’s running the place summed it up by saying ‘those old guys are hard core’.  He did. remember Dad and we reminised a bit.

After breakfast we biked off the calories going over the locks to Discovery park.  On the way back the 'Olympus' was locking through.

 

Great weekend.

KELLI’S BIRTHDAY WEEKEND

After a quick stop at Archie Mcphee’s we headed south on I-5 to Portland. Archie Mcphee’s is one of the strangest stores I’ve ever been in. If you need an inflatable beard, a plastic chicken (or rat, bat, or woodchuck) or, say, bacon lip balm, then that’s the place to go (www.mcphee.com ).

We arrived in Portland just in time for the final stages of the great trampoline assembly. For her birthday, Ken had bought a huge trampoline for Keili. The size, on every scale except one, was overwhelming. It was huge with thousands of parts. The only area it came up short was the instructions on how to assemble the thing. Ken Sr had been working on it for a couple of days. He had figured most of it out, but by the time we arrived he was done. The only steps remaining was assembling the netting around the trampoline to contain the inevitable flying kid.

Andy, Kelli’s uncle arrived on the scene and together we put up the netting. The wrong way. But then we figured it out, reworked it and had things pretty well done except for a few hundred knots to tie the netting down. Finally it simply got too dark to make headway and we went in for Judy’s Swedish Meatball dinner.

Saturday was the day of the party. It was held at ‘Evergreen Wing and Waves’. It was my first time there, so I’ll give you my first impressions. Take the largest amphibious plane in the world (the Spruce Goose) from a billionaire recluse (Howard Hughes) and build a huge building around it. Now surround that with hundreds of airplanes and make it a museum. That’s the ‘wing’ part. Now take a real 747, put it on top of another huge building that contains a few pools, waterslides and wave making machine, but keep the museum theme. To make it really special, construct 4 waterslides from the interior of the 747 on the roof and have kids shoot through pipes all the way down to the pools. That’s the ‘wave’ part.

Within the waterpark there are rooms with themes. Kelli’s was in a nautical room and her pizza and cake was served on a large table shaped like a boat. Just outside these rooms there are dozens of little kiosks with math problems, brain twisters, and other factoids that were fun and entertaining. Bobby did pretty good at the problems.

(Answer at the end of this post)

Bobby, with his built-in life jacket in his spiderman swim suit, just started kindergarten. But he reads like a second going on third grader. He was the only boy in a sea of girls.

Kelli and her friends were given a little science experiment before lunch involving a non-Newtonian fluid. A non-Newtonian fluid has the properties of both a solid and a liquid (yeah, I just learned that). Held loosely, it’s a liquid, but when handled roughly it’s a solid. It’s weird. And fun. The girls seemed to love it.

After pizza and cake it was off to the pool. Ken Jr, Sr. and Juli gave heroic performances staying in the pool with the girls (and Bobby) and a few hundred others. It was fun to watch. For a while. Then Bobby’s dad, Rob, mentioned that he belonged to a couple of wine clubs and was off to the nearby vineyards to pick up some wine.

Nearby vineyards? This is truly a great area.

In about 10 minutes we were at Carlton vineyards tasting a nice, crisp pinot gris followed by several abundantly acceptable pinot noir’s. The afternoon was really turning out to be wonderful.

We climbed back into the car and on the way back, stopped in at Troon vineyards on a whim. Rob had never heard of them, but there was something inviting about the front of the winery. We took a flier and headed in.

What a gem. Troon’s grapes are from Southern Oregon, and there was not one Pinot in the line up which was unusual given the area we were in. Their wines were bigger and bolder and they had nice cheese and jam pairings for their tastings. Wonderful.

We had been naming wines by the days of the week – Wednesday Wine was something for the middle of the week, pleasant, but nothing special. Say to go with a quick pasta dinner. Tuesday wines were a little worse than that, Thursday wines were higher in the pecking order. Troon’s wines were in the Friday/Saturday range.

After about an hour and a half of good conversation and wine tasting we headed back the huge building with the 747 on top and thousands of screaming kids. The rest of the party was just wrapping things up. Jodi and I rode with Rob, Christina and Bobby and hit one more winery on the way. It was Joe Dobbes winery which was excellent.

Dinner for the evening was at Ken Jr’s house, home of a newly completed HUGE trampoline.

We picked up some Salmon and other makings for dinner on the way and arrived to happy bouncing kids and a rather frantic Ken Jr pacing back and forth in front of his TV.

Ken had gone to NC State and closely follows college football. Down 16 to zero at the half against the number 3 ranked Florida Seminoles, NC State wolfpack seemed well outgunned. The Seminoles were aiming for a national championship.

When we walked in, the Wolfpack had blocked a Florida punt and the momentum appeared to be changing. Could the unranked Wolfpack really pull a shocker of an upset? That question hung rather heavy causing Ken Jr to pace in front of the TV with periodic outbursts.

Jodi prepared the appetizers, salad, and topping for the salmon with quite a bit of noise and distraction in the room.

Ken and I worked the grill and the salmon. It was an aerobic workout for Ken, dashing in to check on the score, as the final seconds wound down. The score was 16 to 10, the Wolfpack behind, but marching down the field with precious little time to go. Twice it got down to 4th down, twice they made 4th down conversions to keep the drive alive. Clock ticking down (quick! Flip the salmon), a third 4th down, with only 3 yards to go, the final play with no time left.

Touch down Wolfpack! Point after good. Unranked underdog shocks the college football world. Crowds go crazy, one of which was in a suburban Portland house.

Jodi’s Salmon turned out wonderfully and dinner was great!

And the answer to the brain twister?

SUNSET

Last night we were blessed with a wonderful sunset. The Summer got off to a slow start, but since July it’s been one of the truly great summers. Fall is definitely in the air, and we’ve had a couple of windy nights and colder mornings. Last night’s sunset was truly special. Started off normal (very pretty), then moved into the spectacular arena.


Had to share the pictures.

Here's how it started, which has been the norm for the past several weeks.

Then, as Jodi said, the cotton candy effect began.  The first pic is with the HDR app on the camera (the cell phone), the second one is just the cell phone camera.

This last one was from the end of the pier with the HDR app.

The HDR app stands (I think) for High Dynamic Range.  The app snaps several pictures with different exposures then knits them together.  It minimizes the washout effect of the bright portions and brightens the darker areas of the picture and (to my eye) intensifies the colors.

WEEKEND UPDATE

Could the boat really accommodate 3 guests? The answer, I think, is yes.


Friday Jodi’s parents and sister came up from Portland. The weekend agenda was a little loose, but Jodi learned that there was a Puget Sound Cruising Club get together at Blake Island, which meant that Blake was likely full. So we motored over to Port Madison for the evening.

Chef Jodi prepared shrimp tacos. They took a while to prepare, but the results were well worth the wait.  We enjoyed a great sunset during dinner.

Saturday morning included a walk to a nearby park and a decent row in the shell for me and a long kayak outing for Ken and Jodi.

After lunch we motored back across the sound and locked through to the lake.  Mount Rainier was out.

We went through the large locks which enabled me to demonstrate my method of offering words of encouragement to the crew. I’d prefer to characterize it as ‘helpful hints’. The crew disagreed and called it shouting. Given that this is my blog, I’ll just say I really wasn’t yelling, just trying to point out that the fenders were a little high. In sort of a hurried, forceful way…..

We locked through without incident (other than the above), and wound up at the center for wooden boats, where we had arranged for moorage.

Saturday night’s dinner was “Serious Pie” (thank you, Ken).

Sunday morning dawned glorious and showcased just how busy Lake Union can be. It was the ‘Tail of The Lake’ regatta and over two hundred shells of all configurations were competing in the first race of the Fall. Singles, pairs, doubles, 4’s with, 4’s without, quads and eights all were going around lake union. There were spectators, lots of them by rowing standards, on the hill at Gas Works park.

The club names speak to the popularity of rowing. The old standbys as well as newer clubs. Green Lake Crew, Sammamish Rowing Club, Pocock Rowing Center, Vashon Island Rowing Club, Conibear Rowing Club, Seattle Rowing Center, Ancient Mariners Rowing Club, Martha’s Mom’s, Mt. Baker Crew, Lake Washington Rowing Club, Lake Union Rowing Club, Commencement Bay Rowing Club, Olympia Area Rowing Assn (O.A.R. – clever), the Anchorage Rowing club, North Cascades Crew, and the Kenai Crewsers (also clever).

Rowing has grown quite a bit since the early masters rowing programs of ‘Dicks Chicks’ and the ‘Ancient Mariners’.

Later that day Ken, Judy, Jodi, and Juli all went to Pike Place Market and Rex and I took a bullfrog ride to see the 2nd annual “Norm Blanchard Regatta”. There was a Blanchard Sr, a couple of Beetle Cats, and two old Dragons in the field. US 10 and and US 35 were the Dragons.

The ‘classic plastic’ fleet of San Juan 21’s were also on the course and on a different part of the lake, several El Toro’s were racing.

While the boats were racing, seaplanes had to pick and choose where to land. Rex and I got real up close and personal with a de Havilland landing.

The ‘Queen of Seattle’ was out as well.

Back near the center for wooden boats, a manmade pond was used for small pond boats and aspiring skippers.

In the afternoon we took the small locks back to the salt water. As we approached I gargled with honey and lemon, tuning up the pipes so that I could precisely express my instructions to the crew, but the earlier verbal lashings had their intended result. The crew performed flawlessly, and let the record state there were no raised voices during the return trip.

All and all a great weekend to be on the water.