The Cry of Seagulls
August 17, 2016
“And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?”
— C. S. Lewis
One memorable part of my day trip to Rialto Beach was that I got many great photographs of seagulls in flight. They were feeding in the surf, right at the edge the water, and they were swooping past at eye level. So here are the results of my photo frenzy capturing the freedom of flight:
Road Trips and the Mind
August 3, 2014
“Carried along on the hum of the motor and the countryside passing by, the journey itself flows through you and clears your head. Ideas one held on to without any reason depart; others, however, are readjusted and settle like pebbles at the bottom of a stream. There’s no need to interfere; the road does that work for you. One would like to think that it stretches out like this, dispensing its good offices, not just to the ends of India but even further, until death.”
— Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
This has been a vacation-less summer for me, and I’ve been craving a getaway. This weekend my husband and I took a daytrip to a few ocean beaches on the Olympic Peninsula. We drove from sun up to sun down — a long day — but relaxing in the way Bouvier describes in the quote above, the miles stringing along with free-flowing thoughts and impressions. The day was a tonic.
We explored two beaches I had never been to before near La Push on the Pacific coast and Rialto Beach where I had taken my niece last year. Our summer weather has been hot and sunny lately, but interestingly, a fog bank had settled right where the water met the land, and it stayed cool and gray on the beaches. We could barely make out the silhouettes of sea stacks off shore. Still, being by the ocean was restorative — the fresh smells of salt and wet sand, the rhythmic crashing of the waves.
Seattle Day Trip: Hoh Rain Forest
November 13, 2010
On my day-off work this week, my husband and I took a road trip to the Olympic Peninsula to visit the Hoh Rain Forest, a temperate rain forest in our state that averages over 12 feet of rain per year! We caught the Edmonds-Kingston ferry across Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula. It hadn’t started raining yet.
As we drove Hwy 101 north and west, we left any sun breaks and saw low-lying clouds caught in the trees on the mountain slopes. By the time we reached Lake Crescent, it was raining. From then on, our windshield wipers got a real workout.
It was still raining when we arrived at the Hoh Rainforest. We hiked the Hall of Mosses trail, a 3/4 mile easy loop, where we were surrounded by immense trees, ferns, mosses and lichens.
Some of the prettiest scenery on our drive was the section of Hwy 101 along Lake Crescent. This was a trip where the journey was as satisfying as the destination.