Bunces in NW USA - Sept - Oct 2016

This visit to Victoria was to be our rest and recovery time.  So with our backpacks on we walked the 200 yards to our hotel which was handily located next to the Government building and about 400 yards from the downtown area with all the shops and restaurants.  At first glance Victoria was very appealing, not a huge centre, relatively low rise and for some indefinable reason clearly not in the USA.  It’s claimed to be the most English city in North America but isn’t like any English city we know, apart from an area of one large park that reminded us of one in Cheltenham.  That first glance was an accurate one because we found the centre of Victoria to be a delightful place.   Oh, and if anyone doesn’t know just how big Canada is, I can tell you that it’s further to the east coast of the country from Victoria than it is to Japan. On our first trip into town we found a busker in a kilt strangling a cat mysteriously disguised as a set of bagpipes wi...

Excluding Alaska, we’re now heading into the far north-west corner of the USA, a great mountainous promontory with Puget Sound and Seattle in somewhat of a rain shadow to the east and nothing but Pacific Ocean to the west.  The Olympic Peninsula rises to nearly 8,000 feet and we head up the eastern side in the expected rain towards Port Townsend, a town noted for the many Victorian buildings still there.   About an hour or so north of Olympia we’re running alongside the water, a natural tidal area strangely called the Hood Canal and we notice a rocky piece of foreshore with a few birds.  So we stop and get the binoculars out and find on closer inspection that there are fifty or so seals, four adult Bald Eagles and half a dozen or so immature Baldies plus other birds.   There’s a café right next to us and no sign that anyone there takes any notice of what is a pretty spectacular spot and what is the best sighting of Bald Eagles we’ve ever had.  No ...

It really was at the last minute that we decided which way we were going to go as we dropped Bonnie and Newt at Seattle airport.  We’d boiled our choice down to northwest onto the Olympia Peninsula which we had been told was beautiful but it has a west coast which is about the wettest place in the states, unless you’re underwater or southwards to see the also reportedly beautiful Oregon coast.  There were nine days left until we were due back in Seattle to drop off our car and make our way by an as yet undecided form of transport to Vancouver.  There was a bewildering choice of public transport, coach, train, high-speed hydrofoil and seaplane.  Current favourite and most expensive is seaplane.  So we headed back towards the Columbia River, crossed, turned right, stopped for some fruit pie and cawfee and pitched up at Astoria, just at the mouth of the river where it spills into the Pacific.  Astoria is a small attractive town with a Victorian/Edward...

Home to Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks and often ranked as the best city to live in the USA, Seattle is a big place but just like in many of the individual States, the big city isn’t the capital.  That’s Olympia, of which more later.  Not much more but later anyway. As we park the car in a multi-storey a block away from our hotel for a couple of days while we’re here, we note that we’ve covered about 3,000 miles in 18 days, all on the wrong side of the road.  It was ok though, everyone else was on the wrong side too.  Our hotel was in the perfect location for a quick visit, being within a couple of blocks of Pike Place Market on the waterfront.  See that’s one film title I’ve slipped in there.  Everything we wanted to see was within about a mile.  The hotel café even had a real fireplace with a fire which on closer inspection was a television set showing a fire on a loop.  Pumpkin seems to be used for everything you could imagine and more ...

With all these miles being driven it is good that our car, a decent sized Kia is doing 45 miles or so to a US gallon (smaller than ours as regular readers will know) and that filling it up costs about $20 (about £15).  We’ve rolled through southern Idaho, missing out on the undoubted delights of Moscow and Walla Walla.  I could assume that Russian emigres might have named the former but I can’t imagine a bunch of Aussies coming through Ellis Island and pitching up here in Idaho.   The landscape now though is surprising, consisting of mile upon mile of undulating golden grain stubble glinting in the sun with distant mountains as always guarding the horizons.  We’re seeing a lot of undulating but still no potatoes. Before we got here I had assumed in my ignorance that there were the mid-western plains, then the Rocky Mountains and then a bit more plains and then the Pacific.  I had thought that The Rockies would be a bit more like the Alps, a big barri...

I wanted to say some more about the wildlife here, or at least the bigger stuff.  Yellowstone has a number of large mammals and while bears are the most obvious creatures to keep a safe distance from there are other dangerous animals around.  The big ‘uns are Moose, Elk, Mule Deer and Bison.  Bison are of course those big shaggy prehistoric looking car sized animals shaped a bit like an American Football player, all big shoulders and a little arse.  They look very placid and calm but the occasional tourist seems to think that ambling up and turning their back for a photo opportunity is a good idea.  Bison are very quick and very powerful, quicker than Usain Bolt and he doesn’t have great big horns to toss you in the air.  We’ve seen a couple of news stories of tourists who have done just this.  I suppose Bison have personal space too and they feel uncomfortable when it’s encroached upon.   Elk and Mule Deer are basically big deer and at on...

Dubois is a bit dead and alive but fine for a couple of days.  One thing that was good about the place was that all the various eating places were local.  There were no Denny’s, Dairy Queen, TacoBell, Wendy’s or any other quick and tacky fast food outlets that most of you Brits will have never heard of.  Not even a Starbucks, unlike Denver where there appeared to be a City Statute that a Starbucks had to be on every block.  There are a huge amount of deer antlers collected in these areas after the deer shed them and they’re made into chandeliers, arched gateways, various carvings and so on.  Winters are long here.  One shop here had a moose antler (which has a large flat surface) and with great skill someone had carved a semi-relief silhouette of horses running across a sagebrush strewn landscape.  Unfortunately the carver had over s’d the thing and had carved the title into it as Dessert Fire.    As you would imagine the big wide open...

These are my first notes from our 6 week NW USA and British Columbia trip, taking in the Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Oregon and Washington State and finishing in Vancouver.   We’re really pleased that we get to spend two weeks or so with our friends Bonnie and Newt from Massachusetts who join us after a week or so when we get to the Grand Tetons.  The most convenient hub airport for us was Denver, a mere 500 mile drive from the Grand Tetons, named by French miners or trappers depending on your source material.  Grand Tetons translates as Big Breasts so it is just a matter of conjecture what these Frenchies were thinking about after months in the wilderness.  This time I brought something that I’d never taken on any trip before.  Appearing the day before we left, it was an attack of Gout which was fortunately relatively mild.  So wearing just one pair of thin socks I managed to wear my walking boots for the flight and sp...