For Easter, Bree gives Jan a drawing she made: a scene depicting their nightly bedtime reading ritual.
We fly to the D.C. area to spend the girls’ spring break visiting Angela’s parents in McLean, VA. Jan’s been sick for the past four days, but rather than stay behind, drags himself onto the plane.
Angela takes the girls to the National Museum of Natural History. The girls love it. Here Bree poses next to a giant squid.
Jan spends the day convalescing at the Chen house.
The Chens take us out to dinner at a teppanyaki restaurant — an American-style one, complete with the usual jokes and spatula theatrics. Anya and Liya like the bit where the chef flings bits of cooked shrimp in their air and they catch the shrimp in their mouths. Bree demurs.
Angela takes the girls to visit the Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial. Afterwards, because Bree’s good friend Sophia is also visiting D.C., they meet up with Sophia in Georgetown to get ice cream.
Jan’s finally feeling well enough to do a tiny bit of sightseeing. The five of us go into D.C. to visit the Spy Museum. It’s well worth seeing. We like the all the gadgetry: a camera hidden in a pen, a microphone and transmitter hidden in a shoe, etc. But the highlight might be the opportunity to crawl around in a large air duct just like a movie spy.
Afterwards, Jan heads back to McLean, while the girls successfully lobby Angela into taking them back for another visit to the National Museum of Natural History.
We visit Mt. Vernon, the family home of George Washington. Spring has been very late to come to D.C. this year, but today is a perfect spring day. As a bonus, Jan’s finally feeling in better health.
At Mt. Vernon, we reunite with the family of Ben and Katherine, a couple we met a few years ago at a family summer camp. Their daughter, Georgia, is Bree’s age, and the two became fast friends during camp.
Katherine take us into the Old Town portion of Alexandria. We have ice cream at Pops, then tour the small Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary. Anya impresses the tour guide by correctly naming all four humors of medieval medicine. Everyone can name blood and water/phlegm, but Anya also names “black bile” and “yellow bile”. We look at the bloodletting equipment, and are grateful to live in an era with better medicine.
Katherine takes us on a quick visit to the school of St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes. It turns out that their son, Quentin, attends the school — the same school Angela attended when she was a girl, from 2nd grade to 9th grade. The girls’ school and boys’ school are now combined, but otherwise the campus is very much the way Angela remembers it.
Anya hypnotizes Quentin. Ben and Katherine host us for dinner at their home in Alexandria. While the adults chat, our girls play with Quentin and Georgia. Somehow it transpires that Anya is trying to learn how to hypnotize people — and Quentin has always wanted to be hypnotized. Reading from a hypnotist’s script on her phone, Anya quickly lulls Quentin into a drowsy state. When she tells him that he can wake up, he does.
Backpacking trip to northern Olympic Coast. Jan’s trying to do a hike each month from March – October. April’s trip is with former Microsoft colleague Derik Stenerson to the far western edge of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The 3-day hike covers only about 20 miles of wild, deserted coastline, but the terrain varies greatly. Some stretches are wide open, sandy beaches (as shown here), while others require carefully picking one’s way across slippery, seaweed-covered rocks when the tide is out. Although the coast is known for frequent rain, the forecast for the weekend calls for excellent weather.
The Olympic Coast collects a lot of driftwood. Many other things wash up on shore, too. Jan and Derik come across some plastic cargo palettes from Japan. Jan reads the text on the side of a palette: “It says, ‘Japan Palette Rental’.” Derik: “Guess they’re not getting their deposit back.”
While there are campsites along the coast, some of them are hard to find. Jan and Derik reach the area where they plan to camp the first night, but that stretch of beach has high cliffs. They can only find a couple of tiny sites on little ledges just above the high-tide mark. They’re resigned to camping on one of those, when they notice an old fishing buoy hanging from a tree. Those buoys mark campsites, although in this case, they can’t see one. What they see is a small stream coming down a narrow, fern-choken gully — and a rope leading up. They use the rope to pull themselves slowly up the gully toward the top of a bluff. This takes a good deal of work. Jan: “There had better be something good up here.”
There is! They find some nice flat campsites at the top of the bluff, surrounded by dense, green forest. From their vantage point high above the beach, they can watch the sun set over the Pacific as they eat dinner.
Logistics on this coast hike are dominated by tide concerns. There are three headlands on the hike that can only be rounded at low tide. Jan and Derik spend the morning of day #2 slowly picking their way across a variety of rocky beaches as the tide comes in. Eventually, they’re forced up onto a ledge above the high-tide mark, where they have lunch, nap, and wait for the tide to go back out.
The beach flotsam includes whale bones. This bone is about about the size of a basketball.
Some of the coast headlands can’t be rounded, even at low tide. At those points, ropes and rickety ladders lead up the bluffs and over the headland. These devices all feel slightly dodgy, but thankfully hold weight.
This stretch of the Olympic coast has plenty of sea stacks and offshore islands.
It’s surprising how varied the texture of each beach is. One beach may have tiny pebbles, the next rocks the size of marbles, the next giant slippery boulders, the next sharp rocks covered in barnacles. The beach right in front of the campsite for day #2 is covered with flat rocks just right for skipping.
Sunset on day #2. Although there are numerous other people camping in the campsites, many of them walked straight in via forest service roads and unofficial trails. Jan and Derik have spent the whole day hiking down the coast without seeing other hikers.
On the morning of the last day of coast hiking, Jan and Derik have to round Cape Johnson before the tide gets too high. If they miss that tide, they’ll have to wait hours for the tide to go back out, adding half a day to their hike. To make sure they get there in time, they wake up at sunrise, 5:30 am, and hit the beach shortly afterwards. The sea stacks look beautiful in the early morning mist.
One rocky beach is crawling with tiny crabs. Each time the Jan and Derik climb over or around a boulder, they come into view of another set of crabs crawling on rocks. As soon as the crabs see the hikers, the crabs fling themselves off whatever perch they’re on, falling into cracks or tidepools. For about an hour, the hikers see an endless number of falling crabs.
The crabs are tiny. This one is considering the camera, but most of them point their tiny claws at the hikers in an aggressive, crab-fu stance.
Hole-in-the-Wall
Trail’s end! Derik stands next to the map at Rialto Beach. Jan and Derik hiked most of the territory shown on the map, from the north end of Ozette Lake at the top, down the Rialto Beach at the bottom. Given the excellent weather, great campsites, and complete lack of bugs, it’s hard to imagine a coast hike going any better.
Bree misses Jan while he’s away. A few weeks ago at Easter, she gave him a drawing of him reading to her at bedtime. When Jan returns from his backpacking trip, she gives him another drawing. This one shows a very sad Bree sitting in her pajamas on her bed all alone, missing her father.
Bree plants her sunflower seedling in the backyard. She germinated the seed at school, then brought the seedling home. It’s been waiting to be planted for a while. Tonight after dinner, she accidentally pulls some of the leaves off — then cries inconsolably. Jan suggests planting the sunflower in the backyard before bedtime, which Bree thinks is a good idea. After transplanting the flower, she carefully gives it a drink of water.
Jan drives down to Salem, OR, in advance of another backpacking trip, this time with our brother-in-law, Jared. Jan brings down a couple of toys the girls have grown out of so that cousin Leif can enjoy them. One of the toys is Rody, an ultra-bright red inflated horse. Leif, now about 14 months old, takes to Rody immediately.
May’s backpacking trip: 40 miles down the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon. Jan and Jared drive from Salem down to the tiny town of Merlin, OR, where a car shuttle service drives them to the trailhead at Grave Creek. The Rogue River is a popular destination for whitewater rafters and kayakers, but a hiking trail also follows the river. The weather forecast calls for perfect weather for the next four days, so Jan and Jared hit the trail around 2:00 pm on a warm afternoon.
Jan’s immediately happy Jared’s along for the trip: Jared, a much better botanist than Jan, quickly spots poison oak proliferating along the trail. The two spend much of the next four days doing their best to avoid it.
Many beautiful little creeks feed into the Rogue River. This one looks like an narrow avenue of trees.
Many plants along the trail, like this sedum, are in full bloom.
Jan and Jared’s goal for the first afternoon is 11 miles to a riverside campsite at Horseshoe Bend. They get somewhat concerned as the trail continues to climb further and further away from the river. It dawns on them that perhaps the campsite is only meant for the river rafters, and maybe it’s not accessible from the hiking trail. Jan watches the GPS slowly count down to where a campsite access trail would be — if one exists. Just when the pair are starting to worry, they finally come across a sign marking an access trail down to the river and the campsite.
The site is along a wide, flat, gravel and sand bar on the river. A small group of rafting guides have set up camp just out of view. Jan and Jared walk over to say hello. The guides mention that they’ve just seen a black bear a short distance away. “The biggest bear I’ve ever seen”, says one guide. Jan and Jared take care to hang and store their food properly to avoid a visit from the bear, but probably don’t need to worry. They’re eating rehydrated backpacker food for dinner, and the bear would almost certainly be much more interested in the chicken the guides are grilling over a fire.
Jan and Jared never see the bear, but do see plenty of other wildlife: a group of about 6 or 7 eagles circling over the river, looking for fish.