Anya gets up at the ridiculous hour of 3:45 am to catch an early-morning flight. She’s joining her classmates on a week-long 7th grade field trip to the area around Monterey, California. She’s been away from home at a week-long summer camp before, but somehow this feels like a bigger deal. Less adult supervision, and more best friends.
In the late evening, Anya returns from her 7th grade field trip to Monterey and San Francisco. There were some educational stops, like seeing Monterey’s Cannery Row and reading Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”. There were also some fun stops, like a surfing lesson and a kayaking outing. (Anya and her companion capsized their kayak.) It sounds like she and her friends had a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, the four of us in Seattle enjoyed a curiously quiet and peaceful week at home.
Anya and Liya saved up allowance money so they could order a giant octopus bean bag stuffie. It arrived in a giant cardboard box while Anya was away. Liya stays up late so that she can be awake when Anya comes in the door and they can open the box together.
The girls find their giant octopus bean bag is good for snuggling.
Bree asked for braids today.
We see the Cirque du Soleil production of “Kurios”. It’s Bree’s first circus, and she and her sisters have a great time.
Jan asks why the giant octopus is in the way, but Anya corrects him. “The giant octopus is never, ‘in the way.’ The giant octopus is always, ‘a welcome surprise.’”
Bree, the busy little bee. When she spends a long time in the garden, we ask her what she’s doing. “I’m using a Q-tip to pollinate flowers.”
Later, she asks to look for Jan to get out a microscope so she can look at the pollen grains.
The girls have a year’s subscription to a service that sends them candy and novel foodstuffs from Japan. Bree’s been very eager about a tiny kit they received to make “pizza”. Or, more accurately, a vaguely pizza-flavored and pizza-looking snack constructed entirely from processed powdered mixes. Jan could tell it would take some time to go through, so it was set it aside for a weekend.
Bree’s excited to open the box. It contains a rainbow assortment of little foil packets for various parts of the “pizza”. There’s a packet for the crust, the tomato sauce, the cheese, the imitation sausage, and another for vegetable-ish toppings. There’s another packet for some sort of potato snack, and finally a packet for grape soda.
We watch a Japanese video of two young Japanese girls making the pizza, and then follow along with both the original Japanese instructions and an English translation. It takes the better part of an hour to make.
We finish making the tiny little “pizza” kit. This is easily the weirdest, most heavily-processed food we can ever imagine making or eating. There’s essentially nothing in it that is real. All the bits are cooked in a microwave, naturally. The resulting “crust” is an odd, spongy consistency, as is pretty much everything else.
We cut up the cracker-sized pizzas into tiny slices. It does taste, vaguely, of pizza. The strange potato snacks aren’t very good. Most successful is the reconstituted grape soda, which somehow manages to actually be fizzy. The three girls all fight for their fair share of the tiny cup of soda.
Anya’s been sick for a week — along with about a third of her 7th grade classmates. The teachers have to keep postponing homework deadlines because so many kids are out.
Jan’s first solo backpacking trip of the season is up the Palouse Canyon in Eastern Washington. He’d never heard of it before this year, and yet it’s a massive feature only half a day’s drive away. The canyon is a geological oddity: it wasn’t carved by a river over thousands of years, but instead gouged out in a very short time by a series of cataclysmic ice age floods. For miles around there are rolling farms, and then suddenly you come across a giant canyon.
Jan’s been looking forward to this trip for months, in part to try out the ultralight backpacking gear he received in December. On his first trip last year, his pack’s base weight — all the gear, but not counting food, water, and fuel — was 20 pounds. This time, he’s going with a base weight of just 9¾ pounds. A light pack makes for a happy hiker.
The canyon has no established trail, just a series of informal trails. The route Jan follows goes all the way down to the Palouse River at one point. Although the canyon is in the desert, it’s springtime, so the walls of the canyon are green.
The trail leads up to Palouse Falls, which has a substantial 200 foot drop. Jan sets up camp in the state park overlooking the falls. He’d thought the place might be empty, but it’s nearly packed with early season car campers.
While the view of the falls is nice, Jan thinks the view the other direction — back down the canyon — is more impressive. Again, it’s surprising to live for 25 years within a half day’s drive of this place and have never heard of it.
At the very top of the cliffs above Palouse Falls are families of yellow-bellied marmots. They seem unperturbed as they scamper along the edge of a vertical drop of some 375 feet.
Sunrise over the falls. Time to pack up and hike home.