Seattle and Washington State

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Monday 09/07/12 – Our first night sleeping on the open deck of the ferry was great! It was an eerie morning as the passage was blanketed in fog which made the whole experience very unusual. One of the other passengers sleeping on deck had her dog with her for the night, a great big black husky that was really well behaved. Canada and Alaska are so dog friendly, everywhere you go people have dogs, even many shop owners have their dogs in the store with them. They are all so well behaved; I guess it’s due to the constant exposure to other dogs.

The day was spent reading and relaxing on the ferry whilst keeping an eye out for the many eagles, sea lions, humpback whales and orcas that were cruising along the passage. We treated ourselves to the cafeteria for dinner which was spectacularly disappointing. It was $15 for three pieces of roast beef and some chips (they had run out of veggies). After a lengthy and animated discussion with the cook, assistant cook and the cashier, they relinquished and cooked us some asparagus and gave us a bowl of fruit for free.

The weather turned a little nasty in the late afternoon, so our sleeping equipment underwent an assisted migration to the common lounge/seating area below decks and away from the wind and rain.



Tuesday 10/07/12 – We spent the morning snoozing and being forced to watch the movie being shown in our sleeping room (also known as the lounge room, seating area and on-board cinema). It was called ‘Big Miracle’ and was based on a true story from the 1980s where 3 whales got trapped in the ice in Alaska. They eventually used a Russian icebreaker to break them free. Very interesting movie but very poorly acted, it must have been a made-for-TV movie.

We had two options this morning: either pay over $1000 and continue on the ferry to Bellingham (north of Seattle), or get off at Prince Rupert and spend three days riding there. We were off the boat, through customs and back in Canada by midday. It was good riding weather (we hadn’t seen the sun for about a week!) and we made good time on our route from Prince Rupert to Smithers, our progress was temporarily stalled by two baby black bears crossing the road in front of us.

We stayed at the local government run campsite where some hippies came over (with their ever-present guitar) and invited us over to their campsite for dinner. It all sounded too good, then one of them told us they were dumpster diving and found all these pork ribs which they were about to cook up. We thanked them for their generosity but politely refused. One of them came over to our tent at around midnight and serenaded us for about 10 minutes, when neither of us stuck our heads out of the tent he eventually wandered off.



Wednesday 11/07/12 – The temperature was in the high 20’s today. We covered over 600kms on our journey from Smithers to Williams Lake. A mostly uneventful but hot and gruelling day nonetheless! We spent the night at the Williams Lake Stampede Campground on Mackenzie Avenue, Kenz thought that was cool. I broke one of my thongs today, a tragedy.

Thursday 12/07/12 – Another long day of riding, this time from Williams Lake to Vancouver. Once we arrived in Vancouver, we went straight to the GPS store for a friendly chat with the people who had sold us our GPS (the one that broke about 4 weeks after we bought it). After two hours of shouting, finger pointing, arguing, clenching of fists, and threatening to kill everyone in the store, we got kicked out with no replacement or refund. I was pretty wild…

We found a nice campground tucked away in one of Vancouver’s suburbs and prepared to spend our last night in Canada. We had a great time in Canada, but are looking forward to seeing the west coast of the United States.



Friday 13/07/12 – We crossed the Blaine border into Washington State this morning and had our first proper freeway riding experience. It was all going OK until a thunder and lightning storm swept into the coast, surprisingly no one really slowed down – they just kept speeding along at about 120-130ks/hour! We maintained this speed for about 150 kms until we hit peak hour traffic in Seattle. The traffic was crawling along so slowly; it’s hard to keep the bikes upright when you spend 1.5 hours travelling at walking speed. It took about 1.5 hours to travel 20 kms.

We eventually rode into the city of Kent, just south of Seattle, totally burned out. We went to Denny’s for dinner where the waitress (whose name was Cora) thought our trip was so ‘groovy’ she gave us her name badge as a souvenir. The campsite we stayed at seemed to be overrun with dodgy Bogans. Their kids, aged between 5 to 16, were running riot for most of the night, their parent’s cooked them hotdogs and Coke for dinner at midnight – very responsible!



Saturday 14/07/12 – After our painful traffic experience from yesterday, we have decided to leave the bikes at the campground and use the public transport system. Conveniently we only need to catch one bus from our lodgings which takes us all the way to downtown Seattle in less than 40 mins. The city was misty and gloomy this morning, so we decided to hit the Experience Music Project Museum first. It had a number of exhibitions including The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, The History of Horror Films, and the Sci-fi Hall of Fame. They were currently running a massive Nirvana exhibition which was amazing. The Horror film section was also very interesting, with several clips from old horror movies that inspired the directors that put the collection together – namely Eli Roth (responsible for Cabin Fever and Hostel – two films that have scenes Kenz will never forget) and John Landis (responsible for Michael Jackson’s thriller filmclip amongst other films). We spent about 5 hours checking it all out.

We spent the afternoon at the Chihuly Gardens of Glass Exhibition, which was situated below the Seattle Space Needle. It was a beautiful collection of hand blown glass sculptures arranged as a garden, including a huge display of glass blown flowers arranged like a creeping vine and hung from a glass roof.



Sunday 15/07/12 – We caught the bus back into town this morning for a stroll down Pike Place Market. It’s a bustling place, like Salamanca market but with more stalls and more original art pieces. Whilst there we ate at a famous Russian Bakery called Piroshky Piroshky, I had intended to leave some space for dessert from the nearby French bakery, but it looked so good I over-ordered and then over-ate the Russian Piroshkys. A short stroll down a dark and gloomy alley brings you to the Gum Wall where people started to stick their used chewing gum. The wall has now spread to about 10m in length as more and more people add their piece of gum to the collection. It sounds pretty disgusting, but it actually looks really cool, definitely a pretty unique place. And the alley smells beautiful, just like bubble-gum!

For the afternoon we went to Chinatown which was having its ‘Dragon Festival’ celebrations. We walked up and down the streets stopping at a few stalls to try their wares. We ran a chaotic gauntlet of stalls where people showered us in pamphlet trying to convert us to half a dozen different religions – I even got handed a stick of incense from a friendly Buddhist. We settled down to watch some Hawaiian Hula dancers (I’m not really sure how they fit into the Chinese Dragon theme, but they were still good), Martial Arts Displays and Chinese Dragon dancing. At one point Ronald McDonald was singing really monotonous nursery rhymes with a group of wide-eyed kids, whilst 10m away there was a Chinese dragon dancing and martial arts demonstration being performed. What a clash of cultures! (I had my back to Ronald for the whole show, just in case you wanted to know…). The Maccas stall was handing out free fruit smoothies though, always a bonus.



Monday 16/07/12 – We headed south from Seattle to Tacoma to visit the Museum of Glass. There was an artist in residence that was blowing an extremely complex piece that required the help of six assistants; we watched them for around an hour before doing a tour around the various glass exhibitions. I think Kenz is getting a bit over glass, but I still can’t get enough! We then headed further south to Mt. St. Helens National Park.



Tuesday 17/07/12 – We woke up disappointed by the low clouds that were covering all the mountain tops this morning; we thought we weren’t going to see Mt. St. Helens! We jumped on the bikes and headed through the mist towards the mountain, luckily around 20kms down the road we crested a peak and saw nothing but blue sky ahead of us, and of course the peak of Mt. St. Helens (or lack thereof…). We stopped at the information centre which we had heard contained lots of information and history about the mountain before, during and after it erupted in 1980. Unfortunate the information was only available on weekends (but of course the gift shop was open…). We pulled into the Johnson Ridge Observatory Platform that is situated 5 miles from the crater-peak of the ex-volcano. The rangers tried to stooge us out of $16 to walk out onto the observation deck, however as I was in a bad mood due to them having only the gift shop open (which was manned by two people I might add…) and not the educational information centre, I refused to pay. We gathered our courage and brazenly walked through anyway with no one stopping us. We strolled up the hill onto a platform creaking under the weight of about 50 other tourists, most of which would have been in their 60s back when the volcano erupted. It turned out to be a very clear and sunny day, so we snapped a few top photos before departing the scene.

We headed south and crossed the border from Washington State into Oregon, and stopped at Astoria for lunch - a peanut butter and jam sandwich, which we also ate for breakfast this morning, dinner last night, lunch yesterday and breakfast yesterday. We went on a campsite crawl in Seaside looking for a campground that wasn’t blatantly trying to rip us off; one site wanted US$35 for a no-power, no-water tent site. We eventually found a nice spot that had everything we wanted including a Chinese take away store next door.

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