We’ve been wined and dined to within an inch of our existence. The Rocky Mountainer was truly outstanding and certainly a vast improvement on the Spirit of Washington.
We have picked up our car, and are at the Crossing Motel tonight, halfway through the Rockies. It has been a beautiful day (upto 17, most blue skies with some clodes) niether words nor photos can do justice to the natural beauty in the Jasper and Banff national parks. We will try an upload some shortly from the Bowmanville Internet Cafe.
Of to Banff tomorrow, via a Helicopter tour. Hopefully the weather is a good as it is today.
If you are interested in reading our lighthouse adventures, then scroll down HMK has posted one but it appears further down the page —- so read on down.
Victoria, I don’t recall if I have told you, is a very pretty city. It has about 400k people living there and has adopted a distinctly anti-hi-rise-development view of the world. They have instituted a 12 story limit on all buildings. Its small downtown is easy to get around and its parliament and other key buildings over look a gorgeous harbour. The trip to Vancouver on the ferry, passes truly picturesque scenery. The service is frequent and cheap.
Vancouver is now on the pre-olympics development binge, hi-rise apartments are being built everywhere. Nevertheless, especially in fall, Vancouver is pretty. I suspect it would be more stunning if it weren’t for the clouds that are partially obscuring the mountains. We will persist in the rain and visit Grouse Mountain today, and perhaps Richmond which is said to be one of the largest asian communities in North America.
Victory! At last I have Sting and Annie Lennox tickets for tonight! So, don’t worry I will be having fun! Even better, our Hotel is a short walk from the stadium.
Well we’re back at the amazing public library. We went on an architectural tour of the library last night, it’s book spiral was especially amazing! We had dinner with some of the other people on the tour.
Helen is currently talking with one of the librarians. After this we hope to have lunch in the international district (i.e. China Town), visit the Seattle Art Museum, and take a ride on the waterfront trolley and then catch the Washington Dinner Train.
Yesterday, we also went to the Space Needle and Pioneer Place (their old downtown) and ran into an ex-South Australian selling cookies. It was good to hear our own accent, even though she has now picked up some of the Seattle/US mannerisms. As I set in this temple of a library, I can see through its latticed glass wall that the fog has cleared much early today! We were still foggy until well after lunch yesterday.
We’ve arrived in Seattle. We’ve come to the awesome library looking for comments, but appears as if everyone is asleep, or they find our blog boring! Sorry!
Portland public library was built at the turn of the century and is very elegant. Portland itself is exceptionally pretty and its Japanese Gardens and International Rose Garden is quite beautiful. For those public transit buffs amongst you the the Max light rail cars that trundle through downtown and then onto a highspeed subway are very impressive.
Mr Rann is basing his efforts around Oregon, in most cases there are things that we can learn. For those Sushi Train devotees we went to Todai in Portland a “all you can eat” Sushi Buffet. Truly dangerous territory.
We left Portland at around 7:00 and arrived in Seattle at about 10:30am. The I-5 was pretty free flowing most of the way we missed both peak hours (Portland and Seattle). We drove buy Mount St Helen, but couldn’t see a thing because of the persistent fog that the West Coast seems to be covered in. That was bit of a bummer, so like you we are watching it from TV.
We have contemplated particle masks, but we have been reliably advised, by the the hundreds of tv news bulletins, that that the wind will not be blowing our direction!
Who would have thought that in, what appears to be a nowhere place, Eugene in middle Oregon that there would be no hotel rooms available!!! But that is exactly what we faced at 9:30pm after a long and difficult drive.
It doesn’t look like there are canvas tote bags. I doubt HMK will go for the plastic bag. This library had an interesting display of books that conservatives in the US would like banned. I need to find her… Oh look she just found me.
Please help I am being tortured by the driver (Helen). She is stopping at every small library in Oregon (or so it seems). I am standing at the express terminal of the Coos Bay public library.
We followed signs to “downtown” only to find that we drove through it without noticing. Everything here is on the 101!
Off to find lunch (and Helen).
Kym
p.s. Hopefully this place does not sell library bags. She bought a t-shirt at the last library.
We crossed the California/Oregon state border last night and stayed at Brookings Harbor, a working fishing port. But it looks like it is starting to have a tourist boom especially at the opening of the Salmon season. Lots of tinnies out on the pacific! (Well some of them are bigger!)
Some observations for those of you in election mode. There are NO election posters on the US equivalent of stobie poles, they all seem to be in windows or on poles in the ground on private property. There are, thankfully, no photographs of the candidates and they seem to be electing everything and every proposition at once.
Oregon is good because there appears to be very little in the way of sales tax, unlike California. We were charged 79cents tax last night on the accomodation, but nothing on the food and postcards.
We’re on the 101 now, along the Oregon coast. It starts out foggy but that tends to burn off.
I was hoping to upload some photos of the lighthouses we have seen, but these “Gates Foundation” computers have frustrated me again, it won’t install because I don’t have privelges – I was hoping that the computer would treat my camera like a memory key, but it is trying to treate it like a camera – surprise! Oh well, you may all have to wait until we get to the Bowmanville Internet Cafe for pictures.
Well, heres the rub, in Fort Bragg we have access to computers with an accesible USB port and we have the Cable…. But what’s this a computer still runing Windows NT 4.0? And it is donated by Bill and Melinda, I think I need to e-mail. THem so, sorry, but you folks will need to wait a bit longer.
