Seattle is living up to its reputation for rain this December. We’re pretty snug, since we can choose when to go outside; but a hundred thousand residents of our state have been displaced.

We had an easy wildfire season though, and so had plenty of time to tinker with our bicycles and to ride them around.

In other outdoorsy news, we sold our last kayak this year, after fifteen years of boat ownership. But, through cupidity, and, later, the generosity of an old college roommate, the number of guitars in our household has tripled.  Total number of strings has increased to 24.

Completely independent of this fact, presented here is brief video evidence of a final bucket-list item: Monday Morning Blues

The year’s other accomplishment was publication of a story about our neighborhood, “Two Streets in Belltown.”

Oh . . . and a report on Seattle’s firs No Kings march.  And the second one.

After years of dithering, our building now contains a new urgent care facility, on the other side of this wall, as well as the familiar sushi bar behind us.  We’re all set!  Happy Holidays!

There are a couple of streets in our part of Seattle, down near the waterfront where the avenues have names instead of numbers. You’d say that they run parallel to each other — but then you’d be mighty surprised when they intersect.

Not once, but twice.

Each of them is still one-way for part of its length — they formed what the traffic guys call a “couplet.” When the Alaskan Way Viaduct still stood, Elliott provided the southbound onramp, and Western was the last northbound exit before the Battery Street Tunnel. Each still shows the marks of an industrial past, but also sports modern apartment buildings, tech company headquarters, and some big civic improvements.

Where to start? Western Avenue begins at Yesler Way, the street from which downtown addresses are numbered. South of here, a street or avenue would have “South” in its name.
From this intersection, in the picture above, Western takes off to the left, passing offices, warehouses, design firms and residences — including the Harbor Steps, where we lived in the summer of 2009, during our first year as semi-nomads.

After a dozen blocks or so, Western runs by the back of the Pike Place Market.

There’s a little jog just as Western meets the Market’s northwest corner, and a pretty little commons, Victor Steinbrueck Park.

A block north, at Lenora Street, is the place where Western meets (or parts with) Elliott Way:

We’re clearly in Belltown now. That’s Elliott coming in on the left; Western Avenue, on the right, continues north-westerly, and in another ten blocks or so it meets Denny Way. What happens there is a little surprising.

Like Yesler to the south, Denny defines the edge of another street grid. North of there, addresses reset to zero and avenues get a “directional” name. But Denny can only go so far; in the picture below, taken from near Western, Denny is hardly more than a couple of parking lots straddling Elliott Avenue, serving however to transform it into Elliot Ave W.

This vestigial portion of Denny Way isn’t apparent to the casual visitor. If you drive west from, say, the Space Needle, and you stay in the left lane as the roadway curves around, you’ll find yourself initially on Denny, then on Western for a couple of blocks, then on Elliott, and then, about a mile later, on 15th Ave W, headed for the Ballard Bridge.

Looking back, it’s easy to see what happened. In the picture below, Western Ave W is on the left. The red truck at the top of the hill is waiting to cross what would be W Denny Way. Elliott Ave W, on the right, looks like it might be just an offramp, but it is a two-way street for the five blocks between here and Broad.
In the picture below, the low building in the middle distance is the headquarters of Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Elliott Avenue runs through the park from left to right — under part of it in fact — surfacing near that green sign at the intersection with Broad Street. Just beyond are the Olympus Apartments, where we stayed one summer.

Alaskan Way was the other parallel thoroughfare here. Built on pilings out over the water, it was originally called Railroad Avenue, for the tracks that served  the docks. Cars eventually edged out most of the trains, but the fact remains: in the picture above, if you want to take Broad Street that one more block down to Alaskan Way, you still have to cross the tracks.

Further south, the tracks disappear into a tunnel under downtown; but if you’re a visitor, Alaskan Way is itself an obstacle to tourism, since Ivar’s, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, the ferries and the tour boats are all on the other side.

With the Viaduct gone, the City had some traffic engineering to do, and a lot more land to do it with. Some of the solutions are quite grand — there’s a feature that’s equal parts bridge and aquarium, for instance.  But Alaskan Way is not what it once was. There’s a new street, amazingly called Elliott Way, that doubles Alaskan for a stretch and then, after running north and uphill a bit, actually itself seems again to split into Western Avenue and Elliott Avenue (after crossing Elliott Avenue once), just a block north of the place where Western does the same thing. Here’s the intersection of Elliott and Elliott:

A close look at the street signs in the middle of the photograph shows that Elliott Way also bears the honorary name Dzidzilalich, local for “little crossing-over place.” This had been proposed as the official name, but the City may have lacked the courage for that or to name it for somebody new; so the Elliott name has simply been repeated again. There’s an explanation of these matters at the website of local historian Benjamin Lukoff, the excellent Writes of Way.

Seattle streets offer a lot of oddities, but this area seems almost deliberately confusing. And we haven’t even mentioned Post Alley.

Twenty Twenty-Four seemed like a good year for sticking close to home. We watched hundreds of movies, mostly on disc, even though the Seattle Public Library was closed for a time following a cyberattack. We vastly reduced our consumption of packaging, and especially plastic, by purchasing personal care items in compostable materials and by frequenting our excellent local “refill” store,  Most exciting of all, we’ve given up natural gas in favor of induction cooking. Here’s the step-by-step account.

And for those who haven’t seen it, here’s the story from January of a long term paddling project. For everyone, wishes for happy holidays and a bright new year.

The year got off to a good start. Remember the billion-dollar lottery at the beginning of 2023? We won! Well, not the whole thing:

The big news though was about our “new” electric car.  We bought our little Kona at the end of 2022, but we didn’t drive it much until March, when we finally got a place to plug it in.  Faithful readers will remember accounts of remote bicycle trips in June and July, and then our first overnight journey, out to the Pacific Coast, in August. Until then the car still didn’t have a thousand miles on its virtual odometer. We fixed that, with a trip to Arizona in October.

For fans of provocative essays, there’s one from July:  Singularity

But that’s about all the news we had time to make!

When we first started looking at electric cars, we knew that we wanted one that would be fun to drive and comfortable to ride in.  We also wanted one that would have enough range for a long journey someday. Still, until recently, our little Kona had spent only a couple nights away from home.

Over the last few decades, relatives and friends have been accumulating in the retirement communities west of Phoenix. (I won’t dox them here, but they know who they are.)  By October of 2023 we were ready to undertake serious travel for the first time in years. We set out for Arizona — and a ballet of route planning, reunions and roadside attractions.

We decided to make the first half of our loop via the freeways, mostly on I-5 and I-10, imagining that we would find better infrastructure and greater efficiency on the main roads.  Then, on the way back, with some experience under our belts, we would have a leisurely drive up the coast, taking in some country we hadn’t seen before. (This plan would also get mountain passes out of the way before there was much chance of snow.)

In olden times this 3,000 mile journey would have been a saga of pluck and determination, but for us it was largely a case study in information management.  Each day began with a clear picture of our route and every possible rest stop and likely optional charging station along the way. The goal was to end every day at a hotel with a Level-2 charger. (There’s information about our car-charging experience on another page.) Associated with each hotel was information about laundry facilities, food options, check-in and checkout times, and the deadline for cancelling its reservation, in case we ever needed to bail out.

These first pictures are from our stay in one of the impressively sustainable-yet-mid-century bungalows at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center on days six and seven of our trip.  Before this we had made one-night stands in Salem, Rogue River, Anderson (near Redding, CA), Modesto, and Bakersfield. The visit to Modesto included a brief pilgrimage.

Our home-away-from-home for six nights was the Hampton Inn at Surprise, Arizona, a neighborhood replete with cousins, old flying buddies, familiar supermarkets and wholesome-but-exotic takeout.  EV charging was free, in a space that was shaded until mid-morning; there’s a Denny’s right across the parking lot for emergency dining.

In these post-pandemic times, since so many stores and restaurants now offer pickup or take-out, menus appear online and it’s possible to know weeks in advance what you’re likely to order on a particular day.  Also, though Alex did most of our route-planning far ahead of time, the car itself offers to find its own way, including locating places to plug itself in.  Until well into our trip we considered GPS to be a distracting gimmick, but after about three weeks we began to rely on it.

On our return trip we spent a night at Cathedral City, near Palm Springs, and then headed toward the coast, aiming to catch Highway 1 at Santa Monica.  There’s always a dearth of highway rest stops in urban areas, but we had learned to look for state parks instead — even small towns often have wonderful parks that they are proud of.  Once past Santa Monica we just turned up Temescal Canyon, spent some time at the park there, and then took Sunset Boulevard back to the highway at Inceville.

The Santa Barbara Inn was our first real attempt at luxury. Our room was above the lobby shown at left, and matched its shape with a wrap-around veranda offering not-one-but-two little outdoor tables where we might have consumed our room-service meal, depending on the time of day and our desire for shade or sunlight. Said repast consisted, in my case, of the spit-roasted chicken with harissa, charmoula, olives, almonds and cauliflower. Here’s a picture of the room:

The next day took us north to Morro Bay, with a stop at La Purisima Mission State Historic Park and a glimpse of what is now the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

This day required laundry, and so we paused at a laundromat a mile short of the Hampton Inn, and then made a couple of trips back there before walking over to pick up food at the Taco Bell just across the freeway. Here’s a picture of the famous Morro Rock, from a sunset stroll.

After Morro Bay we were off to Big Sur.  We were again without an official rest area, so we chose our own, at Carmel Sunset Beach in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

From there we headed south down the coast, along a part of Highway 1 we had missed, for a night at the Post Ranch Inn. Only the unavailability of our room kept us from staying longer. The interior design, the food, the service and the provisions there are exceptional. They have eliminated plastic containers — there’s purified water, but in glass milk-bottles; for hiking, there are metal canteens with screw-caps. Snacks, matching our dietary restrictions, also appeared in reusable glass containers. We hadn’t been able to get the roadside sandwiches we had meant to bring for our dinner, so we ended up with room service instead. The ensuing meal was revelatory. The valet took our car, but brought it back charged in the morning, and would have driven us anywhere in a Lexus provided for that purpose. By the way, there are other resorts with guided nature walks, yoga and meditation, but this is the only one we’ve seen that offers falconry.

Since we couldn’t stay longer, we drove north the next day through San Francisco to Tomales Bay, near Point Reyes, stopping at a Chipotle in Daly City for take-out and quick car-charging. That afternoon we drove out to the park, put on our boots long enough to say that we had hiked, and later visited a local grocery store.

Next day we headed inland (the highway does too) and drove to Garberville and the historic Benbow Inn, another opportunity for luxury, or at least gentility. (We, on the other hand, brought sandwiches we had picked up at Amellia’s in town.) Here’s a picture from our balcony. At the right edge of the lawn there’s a path down to the pleasant bank of the Eel River.
The hotel is also a headquarters for seeing the famous redwoods (in California, even the trees have drive-throughs). We did stop at Founders Grove the next day and walked around its pleasant loop trail. We finished the day at the Beachfront Inn, in Brookings, Oregon. Here’s another sample of a do-it-yourself rest stop from the next day:

After that we spent two days in Newport, doing a bit less visiting and a bit more walking on the beach than we had planned. Here’s a view from our room at the Hallmark Inn:

We weren’t through with sightseeing! The Oregon coast is famous for its beaches and big rocks; here, a few miles north of Newport, is the Devil’s Punchbowl. It’s possible, depending on the tide, to walk down for a closer look.
We were on our way to Astoria. Here’s our favorite place to stay there, the Cannery Pier Hotel (partly for the excellent restaurant at the other end of the parking lot, the Bridgewater Bistro). That window looks across the Columbia River toward Washington and the end of our trip, back home in Seattle.

Encouraged by a couple of successful day-trips, we decided it was time to try an overnight journey. A trip to the Washington coast, say, would let us practice our neglected packing skills and prove that we could find a place to charge our car.

We booked a suite at The Breakers in Long Beach, a town north of Deception Bay, the mouth of the Columbia River. It’s one of those places where you stay in somebody’s well-equipped condo, but there’s also hotel staff nearby to make sure that things go well.

It was pure luck, but we left Seattle just as August’s historic heat wave was beginning, and, except for some of our time enroute, we managed to miss all of it.  It was 20 degrees cooler in Long Beach while we were there.

Every coast should have its Long Beach. For most of us the name probably evokes California, but the one in Washington is the longest on the West Coast, at 28 miles. For this purpose it has its own peninsula, lying between the Pacific Ocean and Willapa Bay.

Staying three nights gave us a chance to try two very different bike rides. The first took us east and north, offering access to both bay and ocean by turns.  This route was was pretty urban (by beach-town standards) and involved some narrow highway shoulders, though traffic was light. We stopped for a while at a park that had a tall antenna-like structure; we figured out later that this was the tsunami warning device.

The second day’s ride was along the Discovery Trail, a dedicated bike-and-pedestrian path that starts in the parking lot of our hotel and runs south about seven miles, into the forest where the terrain starts looking hillier. It’s possible to continue well into Cape Disappointment State Park, but we were satisfied with our tour of the grassland and turned around near the Beard’s Hollow trailhead.

The linear organization typical of the beach town makes navigation easy. The little supermarket is right across from the little post office, and we visited often enough to have a favorite parking space. The Breakers itself offers the authentic beach-house experience:  sturdy, versatile housewares, light-blue accents, a collection of maritime knick-knacks, and an easy intimacy with the outdoors.  Every unit has a view straight out toward the ocean, and from the units on the ground floor, like ours, there’s nothing to keep you from just walking there from your back door.  Our unit was near the Level 2 charging station, and we seemed to have it all to ourselves. We charged to 80% capacity, and had about 20% left after the 175 mile drive home, suggesting that the car used some of its energy to cool its battery in the unusual heat.

The trip home took us by the Willapa National Wildlife Reserve and since the weather there was still pleasant we parked and strolled along the walkway. We missed most of the wildlife, but there was public art and some explanatory material.  By the way, Willapa Bay has a Long Island as well as a Long Beach, but we left it to others.

Encouraged by our trip along the Cedar River, we loaded the bikes on the car again and headed for Duvall, near the northern end of the Snoqualmie Valley Trail, another railbed re-purposed for pedestrians, horses and cyclists.

The convenient starting point is, fittingly, at the well-appointed Depot Park.  The Milwaukee Road built the facilities — and in fact moved the former town of Cherry Valley here — in the early 1900s.  The valley had been the home of the Snoqualmie people until the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855.  Homesteading began after the Civil War, and Francis and James Duvall arrived in 1871. I believe that locals stress the first syllable when saying the name.

There’s a half-mile of trail north of here, but we rode only south, upriver, with the winding Snoqualmie River and numerous oxbow lakes on our right. Much further upstream, the river’s three main forks provide routes into the mountains, but down here the scene is farm and dairy land.

In fact, the next town is Carnation, named (then un-named and named again) for the evaporated-milk company, once a big presence. The original name of the town was Tolt and I assumed it was Germanic, but in fact it’s the Anglicized version of the Lushootseed name for the river that joins there. Carnation is also the site of several nice big parks, and on our return trip we pedaled into town and ate lunch at the amiable Blake’s Pizza. I don’t think we ever saw those famous dairy cows, but the trail is popular with horses as well as cyclists. We turned around just here after this bridge, a bit short of Fall City, giving the day a total of 27.4 miles.

The seminal book on cycling in Washington, Bicycling the Backroads Around Puget Sound, by Erin and Bill Woods, first published in 1972, focuses on this part of King County (Bill and Erin had built their home out here east of Redmond).  Alex and I did the rides from Duvall to Carnation, and from Fall City to Carnation, and up the Tolt River, back when we were first riding together, back before the railroad turned to gravel trail, back when parts of the trip were still on Highway 203.

The trail offers a less urban experience, and in fact it got woodsier the further south we rode.  In some spots trailside exhibits provided information about wildlife and plants. Speaking of flora, there were salmonberries too, the third and possibly least noticed of the local brambles. These may ripen to a scarlet color, or maybe just stop at golden, but in any case their flavor never amounts to much. In fact, the plant’s leaves, shoots and branches are as likely to be used as the berries are. They do have showy pink flowers in the Spring though.

This trail’s rustic nature seemed to make it dustier than the last one too. Our bicycles were not allowed back in the house, or even off the carrier, before making a trip to the car wash.

There will be blackberries.

On the first full day of summer, we got our new-ish bicycles, car and bike rack together for the first time and headed down past Renton to try out the Cedar River Trail.

We started at the far end, near the Landsburg Fish Ladder, figuring to put a park and some facilities near our turn-around point.  Though there’s a commuter-like stretch in the middle (paralleling State Route 169), both the northern and southern ends of our ride were shaded by dense stands of tall old trees. We stopped just short of the Liberty skatepark; we’re familiar with most of the trail north of there because we use it when we ride around the south end of Lake Washington.

On former railbed next to a stream, the path offers a gentle grade.  In a bit over 32 miles we first mostly lost, and then mostly regained about 700 feet.  There are spots along the way to view or approach the water — fishing was popular among the people we met in the parking lot. Upstream from the trail, the Cedar River watershed provides domestic water for our part of Seattle.

There are already thimbleberries. Unlike blackberries, these are borne on the current year’s canes. and they mature quite early.  Like their closer relatives, raspberries, they leave their little white cores behind when picked.  They’re not ripe until crimson, by which time somebody else has usually eaten them, even though they taste pretty much like aspirin until then.

Well, it was another year mostly spent close to home.  We did see a couple of milestones though.

We’ve bought an electric car!  It’s a Hyundai Kona SE.  It’s efficient and fun to drive, and we’ve already outfitted it to carry our bicycles and we hope to train it to carry a kayak as well.  We’re still waiting for our condo association to get our charging station wired up, but, on the other hand, after a month and a half, we still haven’t needed to plug our car in.  Sadly, this acquisition meant parting with our 13-year-old Escape hybrid.  The Snowball Diaries, which began with our move to Mexico in 2009, have seen their final entry.

Last year we reported on the purchase of Alex’s e-bike.  This year brought a new bicycle for Scott, as the old one threatened to fail catastrophically.  The new bike promises to be a little more versatile, with fatter tires to handle woodsier parts of the state’s trail system.

Another new thing is the weather.  Used to be, western Washington seemed practically immune from forest fires.  We would sometimes get smoke from across the mountains or from British Columbia, but only if the wind blew just wrong.  With hotter and drier summers, Washingtonians are now producing our own smoke.  I made the mistake this year of bragging about how we’d been spared, and then October kept us indoors most of the time.  There was one day when Seattle had the worst air quality of all the world’s major cities.  Then the smoke was followed by weather that was both cooler and wetter than usual, again casting a pall over outdoor activities.

Still, there were plenty of times during the year when we ventured into the real world. Some earlier forays include an exploration of one of our neighborhood thoroughfares — Broad Street — and an introduction to some local wildlife — Our Crows.  Here’s some holiday cheer from Westlake Park:

Well, there we were, at Gene Coulon Park in Renton, nearly half-way into the loop around the south end of Lake Washington, having a snack at Kidd Valley.  I had my bike propped up in front of me, and as Alex was off getting milkshakes, I noticed a tiny black line running much of the way around its downtube, near the fork. 

Unlike steel, aluminum isn’t required to give you any warning before failing.  I was probably pretty lucky to spot this problem, and to have a chance to find another way home and to retire my faithful frame before any catastrophe could occur.

But of course that’s not what I did, riding instead another nine miles very gently to the little picnic area just short of the Allentown Bridge, sending Alex home for the car, and taking this picture meant to represent end-of-the-line for my old Novara.

Alex is familiar with this scenario — it’s pretty much what she did that time I broke my hip, just with a different car and a different bike. And more distance.

And then, while she was on her way, I rode just another half mile to Cecil Moses park, where there are more amenities.

It was clear though that I should get another bike before my luck ran out, so a few days later I ended up at Gregg”s and found a bike about the same size as the old one, but with fatter tires — what they’re calling a “gravel bike”  or “adventure bike” these days. It’s a Trek Checkpoint ALR5, road-bike in shape but with lots of hard points for mounting luggage.  I’ve changed some parts around and it it seems to fit okay. A mere sixty-five years ago I wouldn’t have imagined that someday I would have a bicycle with hydraulic disc brakes.