Once again Madame McNutty has struck, via Facebook, my homesickness button with a Washington mountain photo, with that photo once again being Washington's biggest volcano, Mount Rainier.
The comment from Madame M, which accompanied the photo...
"Here you go, Jonesy! I miss WA so much!!! Growing up there I never realized how amazing it is until I moved away. It's hard to find another place quite as beautiful".
That is so true, the entire west coast, actually, from Vancouver to San Diego, is a scenic wonderland.
In the Skagit Valley, where me and McNutty grew up, you could go a few miles west and be at a saltwater beach, go a few miles east and be up in the mountains, go 50 miles north and be in another country, go 60 miles south and be in Seattle.
I remember in August of 2008 being in downtown Seattle. Two cruise ships had docked. The downtown was packed with tourists. Pike Place was human gridlock. It was slow moving on the wide sidewalk on the waterfront.
I remember remarking, when I got back to Pioneer Square, which is where I started my walk around downtown Seattle, that Seattle was seeming like being in a big theme park. I made a video of part of that walk around downtown Seattle. I'll put it at the end of this blogging.
The homeless problem in Seattle had grown way worse by August of 2017, which was my latest return to Washington. The homeless problem was not so much in evidence in 2008, where by 2017 you could not miss seeing the homeless camps because they were at the side of the freeway through downtown Seattle.
I have a friend here in Wichita Falls, a lifelong Texan, who, a couple months before COVID hit, flew up to Seattle to visit some friends. She had never been to Washington, or the west coast before.
She told me that she knew there were mountains in this world, but she had never seen one in person, that she couldn't believe the mountains she saw in every direction in Seattle, that it was mesmerizing.
And then her Seattle friends took her for a weekend in their cabin near Mount Rainier, which had a direct view of the mountain. She told me looking at the mountain up close was sort of shocking. I remember telling her that always living where there basically is nothing but a flat landscape would turn seeing something like the scenery in Washington into a sort of culture shock, and that I had the reverse sort of happen when I moved to Texas.
I remember my last roadtrip back to Washington, a little more than a month before the 9/11 disaster. I did the drive solo, which I really liked. I remember crossing Snoqualmie Pass and during the descent towards sea level, and Seattle, the air began smelling like Christmas trees. By the time I got to where I-90 goes by Issaquah I began being struck by how shiny and clean everything looked.
I was used to grimy, litter choked Fort Worth.
I got stuck in slow traffic crossing Lake Washington on the I-90 floating bridge. I was not minding the slow moving because I too found myself being mesmerized by the scenery, by the clear blue water of the lake, by Mount Rainier to the south, by the glimpses of the Seattle skyline. Everything looked shiny, clean and new.
Madame McNutty has talked about chartering a yacht to float around the sound on when we are up in Washington next summer. That sounds fun, if I don't have to be the pilot. I do not do well floating boats. I learned that when I tried to drive a Lake Powell houseboat the same way I drive a car.
Below is the aforementioned video of a walk around downtown Seattle, way back in 2008. The buses you will see in this video no longer go there, they have been replaced by light rail going through what used to be the Seattle bus tunnel.
No comments:
Post a Comment