I AM NOT PLAYING BY THE RULES
I HAVE CHANGED SOME POSTS, ADDED MANY PHOTOS
AND YOU MAY NEVER SEE THEM. THAT'S THE RISK I TAKE
BY GOING BACKWARDS.
BUT
I'VE NEVER WORRIED ABOUT BEING BACKWARDS BEFORE.
NOW IS NO TIME TO BEGIN...





tent nicely tucked


mountain blossom


glass lake


shadow show


mystical mount shasta


day 31 Mt. Shasta to SAN FRANCISCO!!!
JULY 1

(text to follow when i have some sleep)

silver falls


the lodge


chugging toward shasta


nightfire



day 30 Salem, Oregon to Mount Shasta, CA
june 30

i was eager to get the hell out of dodge but we took a bike ride and discovered the actual splendid part of Silver Falls. the lodge (which we never saw during the horrendous smokey tent erection and bedding down at the campground) was built in the 30s out of stone and timber with rafters and wood carvings near an impressive water fall. and the land, once we steered away from the teeming RVs and the tent city, was very beautiful.

driving south, i said jokingly to Andrew "wave to Ron if he drives by..." because Ron was leaving San Francisco to drive north to Portland as we were driving south. and then i realized - this is the 21st century! we can INTERSECT using MODERN TECHNOLOGY. with cell phones and internet maps, we made a plan to meet at a REMOTE campground on forest service land outside of Mt. Shasta, that mystical snowcovered bump that often manifests fluffy donut clouds around its nippley peak.

we stopped in Ashland to sip dynamite espresso, do some internet research and shop for dinner at a beautiful and bountiful food coop. finding Mt. Shasta was, of course, easy. finding the campsite and Ron was more complex and we went WAY the hell up a little mountain before we realized the error in our ways (by talking to a man in a pickup truck who told us, no, we were not on the way to Castle Lake, we were on our way to Mumbo Lake. Whoops!).

we eventually found Ron and set up a beautiful camp with him. very primitive and absolutely perfect for our last night of camping on the trip. Andrew grilled a stellar dinner for us, albeit at 10 pm, then we had a campfire and looked at the stars and ate cherries and dates until we had to get horizontal.

day 29 Port Angeles to Salem, Oregon
june 29

waking up in the Olympics was glorious in spite of a nightmare about being interrupted constantly while i was trying to read a poem. the day dawned bright and the sky was bluer than blue and i thought: THIS is really what June ought to be about. sadly, the month slipped by without a lot of real June-ish-ness. so much beauty but, come on now - SO much rain!

putting up the tent in the dark was a cool challenge and Andrew and i both felt vaguely smug about handling it with such aplomb. it wasn't until morning that we saw a plaque beside our site called BLOW-DOWN describing how 92 enormous trees had toppled in the campground (fallen "like toothpicks) during a storm in february of 1979.

i had a mission to visit not one but two women i've known through an internet writing forum for a year and a half (through NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month) but had never met in the flesh. both were within spitting distance of the I-5 so Andrew and i could fly-in, make a surgical strike for a hug and a chat then get back on the road to make our miles.
lovely Sheryl was a fast farm experience in Toledo with dogs and horses and barns and a husband who likes to race cars. laughing Ellen (we call her Nelly) was a town experience (Vancouver, WA) and she and her husband treated us to dinner and we laughed over home-grown hamburgers then took a photo under the Burgerville sign.
apparently her grandson, Brady, is sure i'd flunk 4th grade due to my complete disregard for capitalization, puctuation and sentence completion (hi Brady!).

i picked a campground in oregon that seemed an easy place to make by nightfall and 26 miles outside Salem, we figured it would be uncrowded on a monday night.
HA!
the day that began in towering rugged beauty ended in a ghetto campground with tentsites stacked up one on top of the next, cookie cutter sardine cans, fire pits smoking so much it was like a scene out of Dickens, sooty urchins riding bicycles beneath the street lamps.

while setting up the tent, it became clear that our neighbors were not only loud but also drunk and unlikely to modify their tone or volume so we walked our big dome to another part of the campground. it reminded me of an amazing movie i saw years ago
called THE KNACK with Rita Tushingham in which she and a man have to move a bed. much funnier than it felt in the campground.

dead fender bird


me, small - tree, big


parking lot barbeque


ferry boat sunset

(playing catch-up now...)

Sunday night june 28
reentered US of A
day 27 EGMONT, BC to PORT ALBERNI, BC (drive - ferry - drive)
day 28 drive PORT ALBERNI to VICTORIA then FERRY to PORT ANGELES, WA

JUNE 28 - the day was shaped by waking up and recognizing my absolute need to GET HOME. calling to check the ferry schedule was shocking - in order to get on the 3 pm boat, the woman advised us we'd best be in line at the terminal at 11 am. wow! no way! so we reserved passage on the 7:30 pm boat due to arrive at 9 pm knowing we'd have to scramble on the other side to find camping. so be it.

next, we reckoned with the contents of our cooler. Andrew and i are both ridiculously averse to wasting food (immigrant family backgrounds inculcate deep habits) and we couldn't get anyone to give us a definitive answers about what foods would be allowed over the united states border. without even trying, we'd rented a motel room with a real kitchenette (when we were LOOKING for such a thing, in Minot, North Dakota, the night before we crossed into Canada, when everything felt quite desperate due to the SNOWSTORM, we couldn't find one. maybe this was some kind of divine justice). Andrew made home fries of potatoes we'd carted from FLIN FLON (thanks to the Wisconsin fishermen who left them in the cabin), sauteed red peppers and onions and i scrambled eggs and steamed kale. another feast.

before we left town, we searched for the Bird Sanctuary i saw on the map. three fruitless attempts to find the land before a native american wood carver told us he'd gone there as a child but when people started dumping garbage there, the town shut it down. what, i cannot help ask, is wrong with our species?

which brings me to the next difficult moment with humans.
our consellation prize was stopping at the Grove Cathedral, a phenomenal stand of old growth Douglas Fir and Red Cedar on the way east out of Port Alberni. we arrived at noon and the place was a complete zoo with cars reversing out of parking spaces onto the through road - very circus-like. we pulled out our bikes thinking we'd be able to pedal away from the masses but no such luck. there were people crawling along every inch of the trail having their photos taken with the 800 year old giants (see above) and all i could think was: it's like Joni said - they took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum and charged all the people a dollar and half just to see 'em. this place was free but we've all become so starved for nature and turned it into a kind of disneyland with RVs dominating the roads in the national parks and monster tour buses driving gawkers out onto the glaciers.

from there we drove straight (east then south) to the Blackball Ferry Terminal in Victoria arriving about 4:15. after getting parked in lane 4 and collecting our reserved tickets, Andrew found a rusted folding table by a utility trailer in the parking lot and we set up the Weber Bar-B-Que and grilled steak, eggplant and onions which we ate with salad and GUSTO in the parking lot before passing through customs and getting on the ferry.
the inspectors took NOTHING from our cooler, just wished us well on our way.

the ferry ride was extremely gusty with HUGE waves rolling the boat. exciting for drama queens and a little scary, apparently, for those interested in stability.

we got off the boat at 9 pm and scrambled up up up into the Olympic Mountains to Heart 'O the Hill campground (sounds corny. was exquisite) were we set up the tent in darkness with headlamps. chilly clear night.

two eagles landing


out there


in here


unphased by ravens attack








day 27
june 27

RAIN RAIN RAIN, again

when we landed in Comox on Vancouver Island, an eagle greeted us, flew over in a wide circle then landed in a tree. then a second eagle landed and the two of them put on quite a funny show. later, the big eagle got attacked (in another tree) by three ravens and couldn't have cared less. zero response.
all an amazing and amusing lesson about not sweating the small stuff.

we drove, in the rain, to Port Alberni and got a decent meal and a decent motel.
the sunset and clouds from the smokestack were moviestars.

we think we're big but we're really pretty small...


Horseshoe Bay to Gibsons Landing ferryboat


heron flies


raven flies


abandon ship(s)!


many many PURPLE STARFISH


to die for view from our tent


night bottles


today is day 27
RAINING
we are in Powell River, BC staying dry in an internet bookstore while waiting for a ferry to take us to COMAX, on Vancouver Island. close to there, we're told there is a "wee" glacier.
on the west side of the island, we will go search for WHALES


DAY 26 Vancouver to Egmont, BC
june 26

the day was perfect. can there be such a thing and what might that mean?
each to her own on the perfection scale, i supect, but for me, in this instance, perfect includes: exceptional weather (sun being the exception on this trip); excellent communication between me and everyone i encountered (including Andrew, my love, with whom some friction has been inevitable, reduced from our usual dual palace-sized residences to living in a four-wheeled snailshell); going on a ferry boat with the Silver Sprinter (a first for the vehicle and a first for me and Andrew in our years together); having kick-ass espresso in Gibson after we got off the boat (at the Black Bean Roaster);
then ambling, without an iota of pressure regarding time, direction or intention for the entire day on a glorious coast, dipping down to the water (inlets and lakes) then back into lushly green landscapes; and TWO BALD EAGLES and one wide-winged heron sighted.

Georgina told us about EGMONT - a beauty spot on the inlet at the end of the road. she'd stayed at the Marina which we looked at and rejected because of a constant motor noise. as usual, the person at the desk said: what noise? because she couldn't hear it anymore. it is a sewage treatment of some kind (they are right on the water) for the cabins and the restaurant. i told her if we were in san francisco, we wouldn't hear it but tenting out on the end of the earth where we'd come for relief from insessant sound, it would bother us terribly. she disliked me at first, i could tell, probably thought me persnickity (am i?) and then she softened and directed us to an incredible private campground 5 minutes away.

there we pitched our tent, overlooking the water and two snow-capped peaks towering in the distance. absolute heaven.

our bikes came out and we made (for me) a very advanced ride on a rocky curvy steep up-and-down trail that led out to the Skookumchuck Rapids (a native word that means "strong water"). stunning currents that change wildly, tidally, making for hugely different depths from one side of the inlet to the other - up to six feet. the forest through which we pedaled was surely primaeval

and in the water?
PURPLE STARFISH. many many many many many of them.
not purple-ish but BRIGHT PURPLE.
utterly unexpected and magical.

pink bushes


shaman totem pole


one eagle beside and one eagle in nest


watching the bird watcher


view to the islands

day 25 VANCOUVER
june 25

we spent a delightfully unMILEful day in Vancouver going almost nowhere.

this city has fabulous trees, old and leafy and spreading or tall and coniferous. the light that comes off the water makes for a radiance reminiscent of san francisco (yes, i begin to feel my first twinges of homesickness). and it was powerful to see the Pacific Ocean again after being landlocked for three plus weeks. of course, i'm not sure landlocked is the right expression given the absolute profusion of canadian LAKES and RIVERS and STREAMS and PONDS we've reveled in during this voyage.

we had in mind to go to the University of British Columbia Anthropology museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery downtown but only got to the Anthropology museum which was MORE than enough to feed our hungry souls.

the building itself was designed to house the enormous collection of northwest first people's TOTEM POLES. mindboggling carved towers of red cedar depicting stories and events the significance of which is known only to the carver and the people who commissioned the poles. lots of iconic images of bears and frogs and whales and beavers and fish in beautiful mysterious balance piled up on top of each other. some of the poles are house poles and some are memorial poles.

i wish it weren't true because i am liking Canada SO much, but the Canadian government, like dominant cultures everywhere, treated its indiginous people TERRIBLY. robbed them of their land, their language, their ceremonial and sacred objects, their children. a typical story of horror and degradation.
BUT
there are many contemporary carvers and printmakers who are following in the traditional ways creating some sense of continuity for the communities that have all but lost their ancient heritages.

we parked slightly illegally (Andrew's tall silver van could not fit in the parking structure we were supposed to use) so we were relieved to find our vehicle just where we'd left it, unticketed. driving around the campus, out by the beach, i saw what i thought was a raven and made the CAW-CAW sound Andrew and i often use to contact each other in stores or the woods. Andrew looked up and said: THAT'S AN EAGLE! before it circled away.

we parked as soon as we could and hiked back along the beach and HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? Andrew located not just the bird but THE NEST within minutes.
the man has an uncanny ability to spot. i may have to rent him out.

just when we thought our wildlife sightings were over (we are, afterall, in a MAJOR METROPOLIS) - some fine urban birding.

a delightful dinner with new friends Georgina and Janie.
and tomorrow, the Sunshine Coast (please oh please do not rain).