Cambria: QUEEN ANNE AND BAINBRIDGE

I am a horrible blogger. Once you get behind, it snowballs. We’ve had some good little adventures, but once they accumulate, I didn’t know where to start. So I thought I’d ‘blog backwards’. Start with yesterday, try to stay current, then add back past stories as time allows.

Here is Friday's view --

This weekend was a rare ‘blank’ weekend. No obligations, no place we ‘had’ to be. What to do? The Seahawks had a playoff game Sunday morning, where to watch it?

We talked about various plans during the week and we wanted to work in a hike or a long walk. Snowshoeing? Ideas went back and forth – but we landed on ‘climbing’ up and over Queen Anne Hill. Rising a whopping 456 feet above sea level, it is a great neighborhood with wonderful views. My grandfather built a home here in the early 50’s and Mom and Dad came very close to buying a house here in the early 60’s. My early childhood memories of watching the space needle go up combine with later memories of talking my grandmother, at the ripe old age of 96, to move off the hill and in to an assisted living environment.

Jodi likes elevation and a good cup of soup, so our plan was to start near fisherman’s wharf and go up the Northwest ‘face’ of the hill, traverse it’s western side, get some lunch, make a summit bid and going down the eastern side to Westlake – where the east slopes of the hill slide under the western side of lake union (see our earlier blog post about walking around lake union).

The morning was cold. Frosty docks. Jodi captured some pictures of just how cold before we left.

Once we started walking, we heated up pretty fast. I wish I would have taken more pictures of the architecture. Some streets have cute, smaller homes, other streets have stately mansions. Some styles seamlessly mesh, others clash, but it’s interesting. And the views!!

This is the house my folks agonized over (the tudor style one). They loved the house and the views, but it wasn’t very kid friendly. ‘Where would the kids play’ was the question they just couldn’t answer and tilted the equation to the suburbs.

This is the view from just below the house.

This is from Kinnear park, a few blocks away..

Lunch was great at one of the two nearly side by side French bakeries near the top of the hill and then we hiked down Galer street which has a series of steep steps from the top of the hill all the way down to Lake Union where we had placed a car for the return trip.

Saturday afternoon we unplugged the power cord, fired up Cambria and headed over to Bainbridge where we watched the 49’ers beat up on the Packers. On the way Mt Rainier was out in full force and Seattle’s sky line shown in the sun.