Our friends, the Shinoharas, come through Seattle on a family vacation from Japan. Toshikazu and Ayako have both been to Seattle before, but this time they’ve brought their son, Riu. He’s five now.
Jan takes them on two days of tourist activities. First stop is Pike Place Market, the Seattle Aquarium, and the Great Wheel. (Ayako turns out to not be a big fan of heights, but rides the Ferris wheel for Riu’s sake.)
In the mid-afternoon, Jan and the Shinoharas pick Bree up from school. They make a short tour of the school, including a walk through the K–3 building. Bree’s former kindergarten teacher, Ms. Leunow, is happy to talk with us for a bit.
Afterwards, we meet up with Angela and Liya at the Northwest Outdoor Center to go kayaking. (Angela’s feeling a little under the weather, so she stays behind on shore.) Toshikazu and Ayako have never done anything like it, but are game to try it. They figure it out pretty quickly, and we make a loop around the south end of Lake Union.
We end the day with dinner at Chinook’s.
Jan takes Ayako, Toshikazu, and Riu to Olallie State Park for the short hike to Twin Falls. It’s a warm, sunny Saturday, perhaps the first all spring — so the trailhead is packed. We have to park far away from the trailhead.
The trail turns out to be a challenge for the family, but one that’s just within their abilities. The view from the bridge over the falls is nice, and on the way back, they’re happy to rest at a bench that has a view of the falls. The trail is quite busy by the time we return to the trailhead. When we walk back to the car, we find it’s now in the middle of a much, much longer line of cars.
On the way back to Seattle, we stop at the Salish Lodge for lunch at The Attic upstairs, followed by some gazing at Snoqualmie Falls (now in flood).
We have dinner at our house, including homemade bread. Before dinner, Jan and Riu play with our “Ring on a String” game out front. Jan can usually get the ring on the hook fairly quickly, but tonight he keeps striking out. Ayako tries her hand at it — and gets it on the second try.
At brunch today, Anya looks across the table at Bree and notices something she’s never noticed before.
Anya: “Wait, have you always had braces?”
Bree: “I’ve had them since January.”
Later the same day: Jan and Anya are doing the crossword. From a tiny handful of letters in a long row, Anya extrapolates the phrase: “ORGANIC CHEMISTRY”. This turns out to be correct.
Jan: “How can you see the answer to that clue, and at the same time not notice that your sister’s had braces for months?”
Anya: “I’m an enigma.”
Jan’s brother Chris flies up from San Francisco to join Jan and their mom Lyn for a weekend of backpacking in Olympic National Park. This trip is ultimately a wonderful weekend, but it gets off to a rocky start.
This past weekend, Chris was on an off-road motorcycle ride and injured his knee. He won’t be able to get an MRI until next week, so for now he’s hobbling around and unsure of how far he’ll be able to actually hike. We have to adjust our plans so that we’ll camp only a short distance from trailheads.
When the day of the trip finally arrives, Chris’ flight is repeatedly delayed. This is annoying because our first evening in the park is going to be spent at historic Lake Crescent Lodge, and we’d wanted to get there in the late afternoon so we had time to enjoy the lodge and have dinner there. Unfortunately, Chris doesn’t get to Seattle until late in the afternoon, with many hours of driving left before we’ll reach the lodge.
To make matters worse, when Chris finally gets to baggage claim, he discovers that the airline has lost his backpack. No backpack means no backpacking. We hope the airline can find his pack and get it to us before our backpacking trip starts tomorrow, but don’t hold out much hope for that.
Later, as we’re driving across the Kitsap Peninsula, we arrive at miles-long line of cars waiting to cross the Hood Canal Bridge. This is a single chokepoint of traffic: the only alternative is a 2.5 hour detour around the entire Hood Canal. We backtrack to the tiny, quaint town of Port Gamble, where we have a decent dinner at the Scratch Kitchen and hope the traffic abates.
From locals eating at the restaurant, we learn there’s been a fatal traffic accident on the bridge, and all bridges lanes are shut down in both directions while the police complete an investigation. They hope to reopen the bridge at 10:00 pm.
Rather than wait around for the bridge, we prefer to keep our fate in our own hands, and drive the 2.5 hour detour around the canal. Now on the Olympic Peninsula, we drive through the dark and finally reach the Lake Crescent Lodge at 12:30 am.
(The following day we’ll hear that the bridge didn’t reopen until 1:00 am, so we made the right call in driving around the canal.)
Olympic National Park weekend, Day 2. We wake up and finally get to see what the area around Lake Crescent Lodge looks like in daylight. It’s certainly a pretty lake, and the lodge serves a nice breakfast.
Chris finally connects with a lost baggage agent at his airline, and is disappointed but not surprised that they won’t deliver his lost backpack to where we are. So we have to toss our entire backpacking plan out the window and come up with a new plan.
The lodge we’re in is full tonight (and for the rest of the season), but a front desk clerk at the lodge tells Jan that there are some rooms at a sister property, the Lake Quinault Lodge at the southeast entrance to the national park. We secure rooms there, then begin a day’s drive to visit some spots around the park.
Our first stop is the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center. We have a picnic lunch of some of the backpacking food we have in the car.
We go for a short walk on a nature trail called Hall of Mosses. With something like 12 feet (3.6 meters) of rainfall a year, everything is astonishingly green.
We make a short stop at Ruby Beach.
Mother and sons
We arrive at Lake Quinault Lodge, which happily turns out to be amazing. We enjoy a nice dinner in the lodge’s restaurant, then spend the evening in the lodge’s large front hall. The focus of the hall is a giant fireplace, but most of the guests are there so they can pick up Wi-Fi on their phones.
Olympic National Park, Day 3. After breakfast, we drive a short distance along Lake Quinault’s eastern short to see the World’s Largest Sitka Spruce Tree. It’s big. Or, as Chris put it: “It’s everything I was hoping for in the World’s Largest Sitka Spruce Tree.”
We drive to Pacific Beach State Park, and have another picnic lunch of backpacking food.
We drive back to Lake Quinault, and make a short hike to see Gatton Creek Falls.
Olympic National Park, Day 4. We make a short morning hike along the short of Lake Quinault, then say goodbye to the national park and national forest.
We make the long drive back to Seattle, stopping to pick up Anya, Liya, and Bree on Mercer Island and bring them back home. It’s almost time for Chris’ flight home, so we had to the Southcenter area near the airport for dinner. We meet up with Angela at a Thai restaurant named Bai Tong, and enjoy a nice meal before it’s time to Chris to go.
Jan drops Lyn off at her place, then comes back home. Total driving this weekend: 700 miles. The weekend did not go at all according to plan, but was still a great time.
Bree’s class presents works on books they’ve selected. They each enact a short (1 minute) scene from their selected book. After that, the audience can look at multimedia presentations they created for their books. Bree selected Kate Dicamillo’s “Flora and Ulysses”. Her short scene about a girl and her super-powered squirrel gets some laughs from the crowd. (She doesn’t normally wear glasses, but wore a pair with no lenses for this performance.)
Jan and his friend David make a day hike in Eastern Washington. After crossing the Cascade Mountains, they reach Umtanum Canyon, which feels so different than Seattle it might as well be in another country.
The Washington Trails Association describes a ridge hike above the canyon, and a hike along the creek at the bottom of the canyon. Jan wants to hike both, and has plotted a 7.3 mile loop that goes up to the ridge, along the ridge, then drops back down in the canyon and back along the creek. This turns out to be a great loop: plenty of views along the ridge, then more interesting terrain and vegetation in the canyon.
David brings his two dogs, Summit and Royal. Royal struggles a bit with the steep climb to the ridge in the sun, and is so happy we make it back down to the creek that he lies down in the water.
Bonus excitement: various trip reports had mentioned that rattlesnakes like the area alongside the creek, so we kept the dogs behind us and kept a good eye out for snakes during the hike. Nevertheless, when we did finally hear the rattle of a rattlesnake from beside the trail, it was still a heart-pumping moment. We passed the snake without incident and then, sixty seconds later, it happened again.
Anya’s Ultimate team plays their final game of the season: a quarter-final playoff game against Ingraham High School. Her team quickly scores 4 goals, but the other team rallies to tie the score. From that point on, each point by one team is matched by the other team. When the game’s time elapses with the teams once again tied, they play a “universe point” (sudden death): the next team to score wins the game. Anya’s team has the disc, but there’s a turnover, and the other team scores.
Bree’s piano teacher holds her annual school year-end recital. Bree plays three pieces:
“Gazelle Prancing”, Jon George
“Crocodile Basking”, Jon George
“Little Dance”, Daniel Gottlob Turk
The teacher’s arranged for a bassist and drummer to provide a rhythm section for some of the students’ pieces, which adds an extra dimension to the songs.
Jan and Anya do the NYTimes Crossword online every night. Angela enjoys hearing them laugh over one another’s guesses.