From: "Philip Merryman" <phil_merryman@hotmail.com>

Date: Thu May 02, 2002 07:01:44 PM Etc/GMT

Subject: North by NorthWest

Hi again,

Having got to Seattle, shaken and stirred, I was most pleased to see that Connie had some bottles of Bass!!! Now I have been looking forward all trip to getting home to real ale, so these were MOST welcome!! So after all the adventures of getting here, and a few bottles, I was most definitely NOT sleepless in Seattle! Also I now had an extra day. So the next morning was a trip to the shops as both my soft shoes and one pair of trousers were now falling apart and I needed replacements.

So suitable refreshed and re-clothed I was able to begin my exploration of the Pacific NorthWest.

The rest of the day was spent looking around the town. Just outside of downtown are the locks of the ship canal built between 1912 and 1917 to enable sea going ships to get to the other side of town on to the lakes. This was an impressive system with locks and a good info centre explaining all about it. Downtown is the famous Space Needle which is was the focus of the World fair in 1962. (Look at the opening credits for "Frazier" !). Seattle is famous to the rest of the world for 4 things: Boeing, Microsoft (hiss), Starbucks & Frazier! Though to be fair Microsoft does support a lot of charitable causes in the area. The Seattle Center site is the legacy of the fair and is an area for people to relax, has concert and opera halls, sports stadium, parks, etc. There was a forthcoming rhythm festival so in several places were impromptu drumming sessions by people just turning up with their instrument and joining in. Great fun.

Connie had already offered to take me to Mt. St. Helens, and this was the one "must do" for this part of the world. I had checked the web cam the day before but found it totally grey! So it did not look too good. In the morning I checked it again and the picture was identical!!! So obviously not due to the weather! I then read more and found out that the camera was actually covered in snow!!! The top viewing centre at Johnson Ridge was still closed due to higher than average snowfall this winter, but the next one down at Clearwater was open. I rang them up and they said that the weather was OK so off we went. However, just like in Australia, distances here have a different meaning to back home. So it was a 3 hour drive down the freeway to get there! A bit like driving from Bedford to Bath just for the day.

Once you leave the freeway it is still a 40+ mile drive up the access road. As you get nearer you become aware of the mountains, still covered in snow. There was this big one at the head of the valley with the clouds around it. It was some time before I realised that this was actually it! Even though it lost 1300 ft in the eruption back in 1980 it is still the biggest thing around! It truly dominates the landscape.

At the visitor centre it is directly opposite but still 10 miles away, it looks much closer. You only get an oblique look into the crater from there, the classic view is from the still snowbound Johnson Ridge. All around there are the stumps of trees which were just snapped off and on many of the hills they are still lying there like so many matchsticks. The scale of how it changed the landscape is hard to imagine. Just below the visitor centre is a sizeable lake full of blue water. This did not exist before the eruption. In other places the river valleys had been filled to a depth of 600ft! All around for miles is like a moonscape with little hills, or hummocks. These hummocks are the lumps of the mountain which came off the top! The promo literature says "awesome" and what happened and the resultant changes certainly are. Seeing it in the snow, with blue sky and fluffy clouds (which sometimes did obscure the crater - it was never totally clear) the landscape actually looked quite pleasant. However in the pictures of the summer months, with all the snow gone, the true desolation in revealed and it much more ugly, but equally impressive.

The next day I took up Connie's other offer of a trip to Vancouver, across the border in Canada. When planning this whole tour I realised later that not including Vancouver was an omission, so I took up this offer keenly. I had been there 13 years before, just for 12 hours, after taking the train across Canada and before flying back. So it was going to be good to see it again. There were a couple of things from my previous visit I wished to see again. One was the steam clock in an area known as Gastown, and the other was the sailing and rowing club building. The former wasn't working last time and I liked the look of the sailing club building, but decided to take a photo when I came back past it, but never did! I always regretted not taking that picture and it is one of the reasons I always take so many now, you can never expect to get back to see the sight again.

The steam clock is a wonderful device. It stands about 3.5m tall on the corner of a couple of streets. It is the world's only steam powered clock, and it has steam whistles as the chimes, which are the Westminster chimes (ie: like Big Ben). So on the hour I managed to get a video of it whistling. It really is fun! Then around a few blocks to see the sailing club, so after 13 years I got my picture! It is a pleasant timber building with gables and white fences on the verandahs, with all the boats moored around it. Then a further look around parts of Stanley Park, which is where I spent most of my visit last time. However this time it was warm and sunny, last time I got rather wet!

However, just like going to Mt. St Helens, this was another 3 hour drive the other way up I-5 and over the border. So I managed to fit a 6th country in to my trip! But this time my vist to Vancouver was about 4 hours! One day I shall have to go back for days rather than hours!

On return to the house in the evening I had realised that I had used up all the film in the camera and it had all come out of the canister!!! So I went down into the basement and in the dark tried to get it back in, but to no avail. So I was now worried that I may have not got that picture again!! :-( So I just had to re-close the camera and hope to get it fixed in a camera shop when I got to Portland.

The next day I got the first of my trains in the US to Portland. This is the Coast Starlight and runs from Seattle to L.A. I will be using it to travel down the West coast before heading across the country. This was a train of double deck carriages. As you walk up to it to board it really looks huge! Each carriage is like a double decker bus on steroids! Upstairs are the passenger seats and downstairs are facilities like the buffet lounges, kiddies play area, toilets, etc. It smoothly pulled out of the station and headed South. The first few miles were a bit slow, presumably due to track maintenance, but later picked up speed, though never that fast. These trains are more like a leisurely cruise and definitely not the urgency of a TGV!

As we travelled south we passed under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. This is famous as its predecessor is the one in the famous film of the bridge twisting in the wind before collapsing. Having seen this so many times (it was a study case on my degree course!) it was good to see the actual location at last. The train headed along the water's edge and in the distance was the Olympia mountain range covered in snow forming a backdrop to the water. On the other side we passed Mt. Rainier, another huge mountain which is the biggest thing around by far and dominates the whole area. Like Mt. St. Helens was, it is a dormant volcano and it is about the size Mt. St. Helens used to be.

My time is up again, so more another time!

Share & Enjoy

Phil