FOR WEEKEND REFLECTIONS (thank you James) and MONDAY'S NATURES FOOTSTEPS, WATERS.
Beautiful Autumn colors were reflected in Willapa Bay, near the little town of Raymond Washington. We stopped here Wednesday for a picnic lunch on our way south.
The Willapa Bay watershed covers an area the size of Rhode Island and includes forested hills, fresh and salt waters, and towns along the rivers.
Four different rivers flow into the Bay. Average rainfall here varies from 65 inches along the coast to 140 inches in the hills. (So that is why we are heading South.)
This example of driveby shooting is linked to SKYWATCH FRIDAY.
Passing the appropriately-named RAINBOW VALLEY on I-5 just south of Tacoma Washington. (And for those following our roadtrip, this one is out of sync; it was taken on the way to Washington State last week.)
FOR: OUR WORLD. We took a wrong turn on purpose and we're in Washington State (and yes, that is North of Oregon). Silly us -- even the geese know to fly SOUTH this time of year!
But we are here to visit family and for that we are grateful. So it is a little chilly and and a little damp, but definitely worth it!
This is beautiful Mt Ranier in the distance last Thursday evening, just as we turned into the RV Park where we're staying.
( I haven't been sharing on ""Remember Whensday" lately because our scanner is not working. These are the last two pictures I managed to get done before the printer connection went gunnybags. It's attached to the computer that will stay here when we go to Florida, so we're waiting till we get there to worry about it. I'm taking photo albums with us.)
Those are 3/4 of our kids peeking out the window of our Greenbriar wagon -- sometime around 1968 or so. This is the car we had when I first learned to drive. I never saw much reason to learn before that and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into becoming a (semi)independent capable 1960s woman. This was the year that Bill decided to go back to college and so if I were going to be able to go anywhere or do anything I pretty much had to get that license.
This is me (not in the driver's seat yet) and our kids -- the oldest one, who wasn't in the top picture for some reason, is there this time too -- and a cousin or two and a passel of neighborhood friends. We are heading off to the circus. Remember when the grocery stores used to hand out free tickets? The Greenbriar looked like a circus wagon itself! And inside it probably sounded like one -- full of noisy clowns.
This Wagon had standard transmission (remember those?) and I did learn to drive that without too many problems. Except I could never put it into reverse gear. (I borrowed a car from my parents in order to take my driver's test). Now the funny part of this is that Bill thought, with good reason, that it was just me being a beginner. Because he didn't have any trouble with it.
Until one day we needed to borrow my father-in-law's pickup for some reason and so we traded cars for a day. When "Grandpa Al" brought it back he said quietly "Billy, there's something wrong with this (*&%) car. It won't go into reverse gear." Um --- let's just say that he didn't get quite the exact reaction from Bill that I did when I made the same complaint ;>))). I guess the wagon was just a one-man car.
I can't remember how we resolved this problem. Bill probably fixed it -- as he has done pretty much every other thing that ever went wrong -- eventually! The scanner's next on the list.
Here's a backyard picnic with several generations of Bill's family. The picture was taken in the late '40s. It is in Clarkston Washington, where both Bill and I grew up. Third from the right on the right hand side of the table is his great-grandmother who, as a small girl, was on one of the last wagon trains to cross the country on the Oregon Trail. She said she walked it twice. (To get rid of her excess energy, her parents would send her to run ahead of the wagon for awhile and then back.) Great-grandmother Elliot did not pass away until Bill was in his early teens, so he remembers a few good pioneer stories.
(Click on the snapshots to see them better. This is my first attempt to scan old pictures and it really works well!) This picture of Bill was taken at around the same time as as the family snapshot above. Back then, he would far rather play with the dog than have his picture taken with his parents and grandparents. Weren't we all like that back then? And now wouldn't it be nice to be able to go back and revisit those days, so we could hear more stories?
When we were older than most of those old relatives in the first picture, we were lucky to get to visit the museum at the start of the Oregon Trail in St. Joseph Missouri. And here is Grandmother Elliot's great-grandson standing at the point where she started her journey way back Click on the link below to see other peoples' "Remember Whensdays": when. We would ask her more about the journey if we could.
I’ve always loved using public libraries but thought we’d have to give them up when we sold our Springfield home to travel full time. But we’ve been pleasantly surprised to get a visitors card in several of the places where we’ve stayed a few months. You’d kind of think that people who could pull up their house and leave at any time would be poor risks for borrowing books, but instead we have found that Winter visitors are welcome to take out a card. There's a small fee ($8 to $10 so far) and all they ask is an RV Park address and our cell phone number.
It’s great to save money by not having to buy books for a few months. But besides that, I like the ambience of a library. I like to look at books and imagine having time to read them all.
I wondered if a building this massive and modern would even feel like a library. It really does because there are lots of small and friendly spaces within the big one. Although the map room alone (for example) is as big as some of the small libraries we’ve used, the whole building has been designed for readers. There’s a café inside, a large but cozy reading area called the living room, and tables and chairs in every section. We learned that Koolhaus chose the art work and furniture as part of the design. The different levels are built as ramps, similar to a parking garage, with the shelves arranged crosswise and leveled. The Dewey Decimal System numbers are incorporated into large blocks on the floor, so it is easy to find the section you want. My sister found a book of Kentucky history that mentioned one of our great-uncles. (He fought a duel over politics – but apparently both parties were poor shots and nobody was hurt!) When we visited my sister and brother-in-law in Seattle recently, we toured the amazing Seattle Central Library which opened in 2004. The architect was Rem Koolhaas. The print guide to the library is called "Cool House", so now we won't forget the name of that architect.
The whole library is e-wired and there are tons of computers everywhere for public use.
The library was only a small part of our most excellent personally led tour of the wonders of downtown Seattle. Our guides had to go back to work on Monday. It was raining and we had some time before our train so we hung out there for a while reading magazines, drinking lattes and exploring the stacks. If I lived in Seattle I’d be there a couple of times a week. Maybe more often during the rainy season! This is a view from a top floor window. You can see the Amtrak Station Tower.
But while we’ve stayed on the lake this summer, Cyndi and Jeff have let us piggyback onto their family card at the Fern Ridge Library here in Veneta (pictured at left). It’s considerably smaller, but there are, after all, considerably fewer people here than in Seattle. We have borrowed great books and the staff is so friendly. No lattes though! This library also gets a lot of use – when I stopped by one afternoon the school bus let about ten high school kids out right in front of the building. Before I left, they were on the computers doing their homework or quietly searching the stacks. I love that libraries are a welcoming place for every age.
No matter what size it is, a library is a great community resource and I am always happy when we get to use one again.
