Between the Chihuly Museum in Seattle and the Glass Museum in Tacoma, there’s a lot of glass in Washington State. Inside the Chihuly Museum:
And outside:
And at the Museum of Glass:
Next: San Juan Islands
Glass
Seattle
As soon as we pulled into Seattle, I felt strangely at home. Maybe because I was a tourist and didn’t have to deal with the traffic, who knows; the city has a good vibe.
Of course, we started at the Pike Place Market, home to (among other things) the Pike Place Fish, where the workers throw huge fish to each other to entertain the tourists, and the (theoretically) first Starbucks retail shop, which, these days, sells the same thing that all the other Starbucks shops sell. The line was huge, so we didn’t go inside.
One of the market’s notable features is the Gum Wall. There is an improv theater below the market; as the story goes, people used to stick their chewing gum on the wall outside the theater before they went in, and in 1991 this started a trend: soon anyone who walked by added their gum to the walls lining the alley. In 2015, the city cleaned all the gum off the wall: a total of 2,350 pounds’ worth. Immediately after, of course, people started sticking gum back on the walls.
Then, of course, we went to the Space Needle. The view of Mount Rainer is pretty impressive.
Next: Glass
Rose City
Portland is a lovely city, full of lovely old architecture that I didn’t bother to photograph (because one cute downtown looks much like another), along with a lot of empty downtown real estate and homelessness—two long-lasting effects of COVID.
That said, there are many pretty things to see in Portland, including the International Rose Test Garden. Portland first became known as the Rose City after 1888, when the city planted thousands of rose bushes—ultimately lining 200 miles of city streets—in preparation of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial. Portland started an annual rose festival in 1907, and then gardeners began planting European rose varieties during WWI to preserve the rose types.
The garden itself opened in 1917. It currently has more than 10,000 plantings of over 600 different rose varieties.
Next: Washington state.
The Tillamook Factory
Tillamook ice cream is some of the best ice cream you can buy at the supermarket, in my opinion, so we had to visit. When you get out of the car, the smell of cow hits you right in the face.
There are a lot of products you can buy. All these bright colors!
The cheese-making and -packaging processes are on full display.
We got to sample three of the cheeses—a sharp cheddar, a mild cheddar, and a mozzarella. I didn’t try the mozzarella, but I did taste both the cheddars. They were surprisingly bland. The ice cream, on the other hand, was pretty amazing.
Next: Portland.
The Devil’s Cauldron
Welcome to the Devil’s Cauldron—the one on the Oregon Coast, that is, not the one in Devonshire, UK; nor the one in Rio Verde, Ecuador, Ceredigian, Wales, or Nye County, Nevada.
Clarke’s Collectibles
We decided to stop in Nice, CA, to visit Clarke’s Collectibles, a museum of lunchboxes, toys, and similar kitsch. The owner, Deb Clarke, is about as nice a person as you’ll ever meet. As I looked around, I saw at least one lunchbox I’d had as a kid.
After our visit, we checked into the Featherbed Railroad B&B Resort. All the rooms are repurposed cabooses. I felt like I was on “The Wild, Wild West.”
Next: the Devil’s Cauldron.
Mendocino and the Digger-Hayes Tree
Mendocino: a cute coastal town in northern California. The city has done a good job of preserving its character, and the coastline has a lot of areas that look like they’d be nice for swimming if it weren’t so cold. (Apparently, I forgot to photograph the town’s distinctive wooden water towers.)
We went on a walking tour to learn about Mendocino’s history. At one point, a passerby—a young guy with a mullet—asked our tour guide if she’d shown us the Digger-Hayes tree, and at this, she became angry and flustered. It turns out that the guy hadn’t said “Digger-Hayes,” but rather something quite different.1 The town lost a fraction of its charm after that.
- As it happens, there is only one recorded lynching in all of Mendocino County, of three white men accused of stealing a saddle in 1879, and it happened in a different part of the county. ↩︎
Point Arena Lighthouse
The Point Arena lighthouse was built in 1869. It was damaged in the earthquake of 1906—although the iron spiral staircase running up the center kept it from collapsing—and rebuilt two years later. The rotating, double bullseye Fresnel lamp was replaced in 1977 by the much smaller LED lamp.
Next: Mendocino.
San Francisco Pride
Right off the bat, the San Francisco Pride Festival had a different vibe than the Santa Cruz Pride Festival, and not just because San Francisco is a much larger city.
As is customary, Dykes on Bikes led off the parade. However, they were joined by some other folks, including some guys from the leather crowd.
They were followed by more groups than we could count. Gun control advocates (citing the Pulse shooting), Church Ladies for Queer Rights, the cheer squads we’d seen in Santa Cruz, dance troops, bands, local politicians, various service and religious organizations, military and public safety, and, of course, corporate floats. Also dogs, and many fun costumes.
The corporate floats were a mixed bag Safeway was an absolute party, Apple employees came out in huge numbers, and Sephora had a drag queen and samples. Ikea, on the other hand, basically stuck some rainbows and “Love Begins at Home” labels on oversized boxes, and called it a day.
Also unlike Santa Cruz: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, furries, and leather.
The only negative part of the day was the local funk band that set up on the corner just behind us. They were pretty good for a while, but ultimately just started repeating one groove over and over; and when no one gave them any tips, they started asking the crowd to “show them a little love.” The crowd continued to not give them any tips, so they just played more and asked the crowd to “show them a little love” more frequently. And when the crowd still didn’t give them any tips, they continued playing and asking for a little love … wash, rinse, repeat, for the better part of an hour.
* * *
We’ve been spending a lot of time in one place lately—apart from visits to family, we’ve mostly been in California since mid-March, and lately we’ve been spending a week at a time at various friends’ houses in San Francisco and Napa—so there isn’t a lot of new material. We should be back on the move in mid-August.
Next: We’ll see.
Redwoods and Racism
This one is out of sequence, but recently we visited the Muir Woods National Monument. Muir Woods was established because banker—and later, Congressman—William Kent purchased 611 acres of redwood forest to preserve them. When a logging company threatened to use eminent domain to dam the area for its operation, Kent donated a portion of the land to the federal government, in 1907. The next year, President Teddy Roosevelt made it a national monument under the Antiquities Act. Kent asked that the park be named for naturalist John Muir, who was an advocate for the National Park system. (The federal government began designating national parks in 1872, even though the National Park Service wasn’t founded until 1916.)
Recently, someone figured out that these early environmentalists were problematic by today’s standards, and the NPS must have decided to get ahead of the story: the sign with the timeline of the park’s history has been updated to prominently feature some unsavory facts.
- First, we get the history of the indigenous people of the area, with the note that in 1861, “Congress removes Indian title to almost all land in California. This action strips Coast Miwok people of title to their ancestral lands, of which Muir Woods is a part.”
- Next, we learn that John Muir wrote about the indigenous people in racist terms. “This contributes to the idea that Indigenous people don’t belong in parks.”
- Then we learn that Gifford Pinchot, chief of what became the U.S. Forest Service, was a eugenicist. He applied his beliefs to the scientific care of the redwoods, but that’s because he already believed in human eugenics.
- Plus, the women’s club that advocated for California’s first state park and first redwood reserve, Big Basin, refused to admit minorities.
- Finally, William Kent was responsible for expanding state laws to prevent aliens from owning or leasing land. His “anti-Asian policy and rhetoric [laid] groundwork for Japanese mass incarceration during WWII.”
Enjoy the forest!
