Author Archives: scmckee

It was possible, a century ago, to travel from Seattle south to Tacoma or north to Everett on an electric street railway.  Then the automobile took over, and for decades “The Interurban” existed only as history — or in a … Continue reading →

We spent the very last days of February in Florida.  We stayed a couple of nights in Miami, and then joined a Sojourn bicycle trip, our first tour with them. The adventure started with a bus ride to the Everglades … Continue reading →

August was an unusually briny month for us, as we spent some time first in Iceland, and then a few more days in Stockholm, and then a week and a half with a Backroads tour around the Baltic Sea.  Several … Continue reading →

In March, we returned to Loreto Bay, where our narrative began nine years ago. Leif and Susan were still there to take care of us, so on most mornings we had a chance to paddle down to Bird Rock, near … Continue reading →

We were in Vietnam early in February, so we went to Ha Long Bay. It’s easy to talk about this geology in the abstract — limestone slowly lifted, eroded by tropical moisture, maybe etched at the waterline by living creatures … Continue reading →

If you look southwest from our window — along the line through Duwamish Head and then Alki Point — the next land you see is Blake Island.  That’s the piece of my shoreline exploration that I saved for last. The island, … Continue reading →

On two of my earlier trips I had neglected the area between Rich Passage and Restoration Point.  This left a tiny sliver unexplored at the south end of Bainbridge Island — and a chance to visit the park at the site … Continue reading →

I had been up the coast of Bainbridge Island as far as Murden Cove, but that left a little bit of visible shoreline.  The solution seemed to be to paddle south from Fay Bainbridge Park, near the northern end of … Continue reading →

Bainbridge Island accounts for a good bit of the shoreline visible from our window, by dint of its ten mile north-south length. It’s one of those islands you could drive to, in theory; but from Seattle that trip would mean going south to Tacoma, then north … Continue reading →

Blakely Harbor is a pretty quiet place today, but in the 1800s this was the site of the world’s most productive sawmill. The original car ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island had its terminal here. Now there’s a park instead, its uplands unmanicured … Continue reading →