Darth Vader Plays the Fiddle

Notes from Lynn:

Travel isn’t just, as they say, broadening. It’s also, as they don’t say, as disjointed as a hip replacement.

In the dark-green dawn Tuesday (Sept. 29), a soft rain bounced BBs on the Guppy’s thin roof. As we woke up in Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula., we looked out to see our moss-embroidered picnic table gleaming wetly at a soggy campsite in the Quinault Rain Forest. It was too damp to fix our own breakfast, so we found a tiny roadside café under redwood-size Douglas firs with green veils of lichen. Oddly, “Goodbye Mrs. Durkin” and other Irish tunes resounded from the kitchen’s CD player. We were still in the USA, damp and trying to count the many shades of green. National Forest fee (half off for seniors): $8.50.

Just 24 hours later, after driving 123 miles, parking the Guppy in Port Angeles and boarding a ferryboat the size of a small town, we woke up in a luxuriously soft bed in the Rose Room of The Cozy Cottage. It’s a bed and breakfast in a very English city, Victoria, which is not in the USA. We sat down to a superb breakfast: Orange juice, eggs over easy, sausage, low-sodium bacon and filigreed hash browns. It wasn’t what the cardiologist would recommend, but who cares? Coffee was poured into delicate cups of bone china decorated with a pattern of white dogwood, the official flower of British Columbia. Shelagh, the owner and sole employee, got up at 5 a.m. to make the scones. She is delightful, bubbling with tips on how to get a glimpse of her home town in just a day. (The Royal Museum of British Columbia, the Legislative Assembly’s domed capitol and walk, walk, walk.) Then she drove us to the museum. The bill: $130 (Canadian, which must be so close to the U.S. dollar at the moment that nobody made a fuss about payment in one or the other).

Disjointed is too weak a word for how we greeted the dawn Thursday, back in the USA and camping in Dosewillips State Park on the east perimeter of the Olympic Peninsula. After returning on the ferry, we drove until dark. It was still dark when we emerged from our cocoon into the autumn chill of a big but empty campground that must have been crowded in July. It was too cold to get out the burner, propane, Melita and Peets Coffee, too chilly even for dry cereal. We got into the minivan and hoped to find coffee on the road. Washington state park’s fee (no senior discount): $21.

I’m certain there is a moral to this tale.

Notes from Margo:

Because we had to return to Astoria to have the car’s sliding door fixed, we had only one day in Victoria, much of which we spent in the amazing Royal Museum of British Columbia. As it turned out, the ferry trip over was also one of the highlights. Tons of birds. Guillemots, murres. I saw a puffin just casually fly by, like it was an everyday thing.

I was watching through my birding binoculars as a black helicopter approached a nearby military ship. All of a sudden, three guys jumped out and rapelled down onto the deck. Talk about unexpected. The helicopter then landed on the ship, and the guys got back in. Then another helicopter did the same maneuver. Never know what you’ll see birding.

Victoria itself is a riot of brilliant flowers, which is the only thing I remembered from my trip when I was a teenager. This time what struck me was the odd juxtaposition of tidy British town with the totem poles and the bold, large-scale, red, white and black artwork of the Haida and other Native peoples. A totem pole guarded the well-groomed lawn of the provincial capitol. In a quilting shop, a number of quilts contained Northwestern Indian designs. A public fountain had several upright slabs that looked vaguely like totem poles. They were covered with tiles that made you think: Native Art. Not surprising, really, that such a beautiful artwork should permeate everything, except that it’s a totally different aesthetic overlaid on this very British town – fish and chips, pubs, very courteous people, tidy houses, tidy narrow streets.

We had just one day there, so in addition to the museum, I wanted to walk around the town. And we ran up against one of the problems of a 52-year-old traveling with a 75-year-old. Lynn just didn’t feel up to it. He has some residual equilibrium issues from his stroke, so his walking pace is quite a bit slower than mine. And he has stenosis in his spine, so his back starts hurting after a pretty short walk. So in Victoria, after some hours of absorbing the amazing exhibits on Vancouver Island’s native people before Europeans arrived, he sunned himself on a bench in front of the museum and read his James Lee Burke mystery book and watched the people parade by while I walked around town. The quilt shop was a highlight. Also – a guy in a Darth Vader suit played the violin for tips.

Some days, like yesterday, present one breath-taking vista after another (we were driving along the Columbia River, returning to Astoria and the car-repair appointment). And after a while, it's just "Ho hum, another fabulous vista." We have to stop and pinch ourselves, and realize that this is what we wanted, and we should really be soaking it up. Yesterday we drove to the very end of the continent, where Lewis and Clark camped at Cape Disappointment. We were disappointed. We intended to camp there, but it was windy, rainy and cold. We came back to Fort Stevens, where we had camped earlier in the week. It was still drizzling, but it wasn’t windy or cold.

It was raining softly while we fixed dinner, so we tried out the little awning that I improvised. There’s still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, but it worked well enough in a light rain with no wind.

Mileage the past two days, Port Angeles to Astoria: 237

Mileage on the ferry, round-trip to Victoria: 52 on the ferryboat Coho

Total mileage (in the Guppy): 1297