July 13 - Olympia, Washington

The advantage to having a campsite that is not next to train tracks, airport runways, or interstate highways is that you have a chance to sleep longer in the morning. We awakened at 6 a.m. as usual but got back to sleep again and slept in until 8. That gave us a later start for the day, but goodness did it make us feel better! I think that for me at least most of the "extra" sleep from 6 to 8 is Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, and that seems to be critically important to mood energy levels, and so forth. As I recall the scientific studies of long-term deprivation of REM sleep, the volunteers ultimately started hallucinating. While I didn't ever get to the hallucinating stage, I certainly did get grumpy, so it was a good thing for all concerned that we had those extra two hours of sleep.

Besides, we were camped just south of Olympia and only had to drive downtown and take our walk from the Bayview Deli, which did, by the way, actually have a good view of the bay leading into Puget Sound from the back windows. Monika found the start box among the tables and chairs of an eating section in the rear of the store, and we signed up and started walking south from the deli to the capitol. After a short uphill stretch we arrived at the capitol, which seemed to be built on the standard plan of a rotunda with dome in the center and wings on either side to house the legislative bodies. The capitol is being renovated and will not be open for tours until 2005, it but looked to me as if they were just about finished sandblasting the grime off of the exterior of the dome.

From the capitol we continued south a mile or two past the state capital museum and along some side streets with beautiful flowers. As we crossed the interstate on an overpass we had our first view of Tumwater Falls but we had to walk a ways along a busy boulevard until we actually the falls, which were located in a small park.

I thought the falls, although not huge, were quite pretty with the sun sparkling off the water as it burbled over the rocks. There were a couple of large trees hung up on the falls that seem to have been brought down the Des Chutes River that cascades through these falls (maybe by a spring flood?), and they were perched rather precariously on the edge of some of the rocks. A serpentine set of channels for the salmon to work their way up past the falls was underneath the bordering walkway and there were gratings on top so you could look right down into it. Of course, we couldn't see any fish using it, probably because the salmon migrations are not in mid-summer!

We curled around the end of the park and a relatively large brewery next door (no free samples!) before we started working our way back north along a parallel set of roads. We re-crossed the grounds beside the state capitol in an area that was beautifully landscaped and dotted with war memorials. The memorial for Korea had a rather realistic statue of three cold infantrymen kind of huddled around a small campfire. Having heard how our troops suffered in the winter there, I thought it was as appropriate in its way as the national Korean War memorial in Washington, D.C. that features statues of an infantry patrol working its way through the countryside. This memorial had plaques that gave a capsule summary of the war, and these I read with great interest, as we never made it to the Korean War in my American History class. The Vietnam war memorial was a low black wall of names somewhat reminiscent of the U.S. Vietnam War memorial, and the World War II war memorial was a rather simple set of 5 wedges which might have symbolized the five services participating in the war, but I wasn't sure.

In addition to these modest memorials, a more spectacular memorial to soldiers fallen in war in general was much more noticeable. It featured a tableau of gilded and winged figures on a big rock pedestal. The whole ensemble was large, eye-catching, and either quite impressive or perhaps just ostentatious depending on how much you like that kind of thing. It is curious how just in my lifetime the style for war memorials on the national mall in Washington D.C. has swung from the somber and understated if not depressing Vietnam War Memorial to the huge, bombastic and ostentatious World War II memorial. I think the nature of the memorial tends to reflect the general public attitude to the war in question, which ranges from the gung ho "We won!" attitude toward World War II to the much more humble "We lost!" attitude to Vietnam, with Korea being between those extremes because it ended with a tin pot communist dictator still in charge of the northern half of the country.

The last leg of the walk back downhill to the starting point was just a hop, skip, and jump. After turning in our start card, we ordered our lunches from the deli and took them to the upstairs seating section so that we had a great view out over the bay while eating. I was somewhat surprised to see an ocean-going freighter pulled up at a dock with a loading crane on the eastern edge of the inlet, but there was no activity so I couldn't really tell if they were loading or unloading cargo. This little inlet is, apparently, the furthest southern reach of Puget Sound, and I was surprised that they kept a navigable channel open this far south for the ocean freighters. We also could see folks sailing or motor boating out on the inlet, and that was fun to watch while we ate and rested. I proposed doing the local Volksbike event that afternoon and Monika, although dubious, agreed, so we drove to the starting point for the bike event after lunch.

The starting point for the Volksbike (and another YRE walking event) was a roadside store + delicatessen combination near the midpoint of the Chehalis-Western hiker-biker trail. We signed up, unloaded the bikes, donned our helmets, and were off to the bike path where we turned south for about 4 miles. Then we turned west onto one of the many street side bicycle paths that they have in this region; the right hand shoulder is clearly marked for bicycles only. Fortunately that prevents folks from parking on the shoulder that in turn makes it unnecessary for us to detour around parked cars into the streams of traffic, which is always an unpleasant if not downright dicey proposition. We found maps at rest points on the bike trail that gave us an overall orientation to the route we were taking. It was not as good as having a detailed map with our trail marked on it, but it did suffice.

After riding west a mile or two at the bottom of the loop, we started to work our way back north along some very lightly traveled side streets. We saw some of the suburbs of Olympia, and as those faded away we rode through a bit of the countryside surrounding the city, which I enjoyed. We missed the turnoff to rejoin the bicycle path on instruction # 20 ("Turn left on 66th for 300 feet") which also made us miss instruction # 21 to turn right and enter the parking lot for the Woodard Bay Conservation area. There was a big downhill slope at this point, and I had so much fun zooming downhill that I went whizzing right by that parking lot entrance. We crossed a small arm of a lake and only found out on the other side that we had gone too far! That wouldn't have been too bad except that going back up that hill was so steep we had to push the bikes and Monika was getting tired by this point. If we were revising those instructions, we would say that you go past the intersection of 66th and Lemon streets for about 100 feet until you see a driveway on the right (no sign). Turn into that driveway and ride around in the parking lot until you find the start of the Chehalis-Western bike trail and start riding south on that.

Aside from that small detour, the way back south along the bike trail to the starting point was, for me at least, a lot of fun. We started off through a grove of these huge evergreen trees, which was a nice, cool, winding path, and then headed pretty much due south along the old railroad bed through the fields. I found some ripe blackberries and stopped to eat a handful. Never pass up a ripe blackberry; that's my motto, and this time the taste was undisturbed by cottonwood seeds! The pedaling felt so effortless that I had breath to spare, so I started singing all the songs I know by heart (not many, unfortunately, and most of those in German!) as we rode along. In short, I was having a gay old time but for Monika it was different. Despite stopping to hydrate every 15 minutes or so, she was getting hot and tired although she later claimed she was still having some fun because of my efforts at trail side entertainment. In any event she gritted it out until the end and started drinking a cold bottle of Sprite from the Deli while I chucked the bikes back in the truck and locked them up.

We drove down Lily road with the air-conditioning turned up full blast to cool her off a bit, stopped off for some $1.92 gasoline, the cheapest we had seen in this area, and detoured off the interstate to find a Dairy Queen, where I had a large root beer float and Monika had a Heathbar Blizzard. You might think she came out ahead on those choices, but you see, my root beer float came with unlimited free refills! I had plenty of ice cream in the 32 ounce cup, so I just kept adding fresh root beer from the fountain and stirring it in with the ice cream to make the slushy blend I remember from my childhood. The soft ice cream melts and becomes a root beer flavored slush something like a root beer shake, but you can adjust how thick it is by changing the amount of root beer in the mix, and that's always fun. When I was a kid I found out that it was one of the few times I could get away with playing with my food, and that was certainly part of the attraction. Monika had long since finished her Blizzard and finally gave up and had a cup of coffee to while away the time while I was playing with my root beer float, but 4 refills and an hour later we finally got out of there and headed back for camp.

We were both pretty tired after walking 10 kilometers and biking 25 kilometers, but the sun was going behind the trees so we walked over to the small lake to get a few pictures. Our reward for these efforts was some gorgeous scenery that the local folks seemed to take for granted. The sunlight streaming through the unbelievably tall evergreens created just amazing mosaics in green and brown. Some of the living trees were absolutely huge, and even the leftover trunks and decayed stumps were often large and fantastically shaped.

Returning to the trailer for the evening, Monika processed and selected pictures while I worked on the journal for a few hours until the sun had nearly set. After all we had consumed at Dairy Queen, we didn't feel hungry enough to make a formal dinner and instead snacked on peanuts while we worked. I found that stopping to crack the shell of the next peanut gave me a useful pause to gather my thoughts for the next sentence, so it worked out pretty well. As the sun set it spread rays of bright yellow light here and there along the trunks of the huge trees in our campground, creating a woven tapestry of golden light and tawny dark underneath topped by the dark green canopy of the conifers.

Staying outside as this spectacle unfolded, I built a fire for our nighttime entertainment and tended that while Monika brought Daddy outside and continued writing her memoirs. She was only up to page 17, so I'm not sure it qualified as a full autobiography, but I was happy to see her get at least some of her history written down. After all, not everyone emigrates to a new country, gets two Master of Arts degrees, one in Mathematics and the other in Computer Science, pursues a career in the U.S. Customs Service, and raises two sons along the way! Some of the things she has done I can't even imagine, such as taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test in English after only being in the country three months! Can you imagine going to a strange country and then taking their college entrance exams after only three months? I can maybe see why she scored in the 600s in the Mathematics section, equations are her friends, but I do not see how she managed to score in the middle 400s in the English section: that's a lot better than many folks who were born and raised speaking English! We enjoyed the fire for an hour or so after sunset until a few mosquitoes came out, and then we turned in for the night.