Washington governor Jay Inslee extends the closure of all Washington State schools through June, so neither Bree nor Liya will be returning to campus again for the rest of this school year. The news isn’t a surprise, but it’s still sad.
Bree and Liya start their Spring Break — which will be a week that’s basically just like every other recent week: hanging out at home, staring at screens, and going for walks. At least the weather’s quite nice!
Sleepy
Jan has Lyn drop him off in front of his office in downtown Bellevue so he can walk back from there to our house. It’s a gorgeous day. The pedestrian lane on the WA 520 bridge is particularly nice — with very few cars on the highway, there’s almost no road noise, so walkers, joggers, and bikers on the bridge can enjoy the sun, breeze, and lake view.
Getting back from the bridge to Madison Park turns out to be harder than expected. The city has closed the Arboretum park that lies between the highway and our neighborhood. Jan has to cut through part of the closed-off park in order to get back home.
Bree made a shirt and skirt during spring break! She made up her own pattern too.
Our friends Julie and Robin have a cabin near Naches, WA, on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. They’re not using it this weekend, so they offer it to us. It’s far from everything, and close enough that we don’t have to stop along the way, so we take them up on the offer.
Liya and Bree aren’t interested in going, so they stay behind for a sisters weekend at home.
The cabin is quite basic: it has electricity, but during the colder months the water is shut off. Still, it is insulated and quite snug. After unpacking, we go for a walk down to nearby American Forks Campground, which sits at the confluence of the Bumping River and the American River.
In the afternoon, the weather’s nice, so Jan, Angela, and Anya go for a hike. We drive a short distance to a trailhead that takes us up a climb up to Indian Flat. There’s still some snow on the plateau, so we give up on our planned waterfall destination and just walk to a little hilltop.
It’s nice to be able to walk somewhere other than our own home neighborhood.
On our last morning, Jan and Lyn go for a walk down to the Bumping River, then make a long loop back to the cabin.
Jan and Angela have been so distracted by the pandemic that, if the calendar hadn’t popped up a reminder yesterday, they might have overlooked their anniversary today. They celebrate with bagels from Eltana for breakfast. In the evening, Lyn and the girls cook a paella for dinner.
Anya has decided to attend Stanford University. She was accepted at a handful of schools, but took a solid month to make her decision. She’s excited to go to Stanford. It will also be nice that, just as her high school experience overlapped with Jan’s, Anya’s college experience will overlap with Angela’s.
She’s going to defer attending college for a year in order to take a gap year. She applied to a selective language learning program called NSIL-Y, the National Security Language Initiative for Youth. It’s run by the U.S. Department of State and a group called American Councils for International Education. The program receives many more applications than it has room for, so Anya was happy to be accepted.
Obviously, the COVID crisis applies a question mark to all future plans. But, if all goes well, Anya will spend the 2020–21 academic year studying Mandarin in Taiwan, at a school an hour northwest of downtown Taipei. She’d then start studying at Stanford in September 2021.
Choate confirms what we’ve assumed: Anya’s graduation is cancelled.
We’re still not quite sure how she’s going to get her stuff back home.
Governor Inslee extends the statewide stay-at-home order, probably for at least another month. The trend is getting better in Washington, but there are still many new cases of COVID every day.