Category: travel

Pandemic Getaway

Warming weather, vaccines in arms for the elder household members and just plain cabin fever inspired a day run — the first since the inception of the pandemic — beyond our normal WaWaWA boundaries.

In Transit

From Walla Walla, we took Highway 12 to Hwy 730 near the Oregon border and along the Columbia River.  (Windshield photography, of course.)

Cold Springs NWR

After landing at Cold Springs National Wildlife Refuge (near Umatilla, OR), we hiked for six or so miles, spotting geese, ducks and other birdlife (including a huge raft of white snow geese that eluded the camera).

Cold Springs NWR (Original pano is 32,700 pixels wide)

McNary Beach

Next, it was a rest stop and lunch at McNary Beach on Lake Wallula, but not without a couple of miles of added hiking.

Twin Sisters

Then we retraced our route back along Hwy 730, this time stopping at the Twin Sisters basalt rocks in the steep cliffs along the Columbia.  We took a fairly short, but extremely steep trail along the Twin Sisters outcroppings, Kim equipped with hiking poles and Ivi nearby yours truly to catch any of many threatened falls.  And did I mention the ferocious wind?

Twin Sisters
Dizzy Above the Columbia

The Great Interstate Donut Run of the 2020 Pandemic

It started with a Saturday night message, inquiring as to my availability the next day and my intended exact location, with little other input.

Sunday morning at precisely 9:11, I received a call from my old friend and colleague, jamesa, telling me that he was “picking up the donuts” and would be near my door in seconds.

After about an hour and a half of discussion and a little driving/riding and some quick and dirty documenting, he was gone, almost no sooner than he had arrived.  Returned to his home in northeast Oregon where his wife was waiting, as he had told her that he was going to pick up some donuts, and probably promising to be back “before long”. Turned out that it was her birthday and he knew that her favorite donuts could be procured at Popular Donuts in Walla Walla as a surprise treat.

Upon his return to the Oregon outback on his wonderful BMW R1100RS, jamesa reported that the 180-mile run, via Tollgate, was pleasant (and relatively cool on the higher-elevation Oregon side) and yielded 47.8 mpg at decent (but not the hard-charging of his younger years — as he says, “The older I get, the faster I was.”) speeds.

Jamesa arrives in WaWaWA in the mid-morning after a 90-mile one-way sprint over the mountains from Eastern Oregon.

And a little more doc:

Window Swap

One of the nicest things I’ve seen come along on the interwebz for awhile,  Window Swap (a quarantine project by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam) lets us watch a rotation of videos taken from people’s windows around the world.  And you can submit your own, either at Window-Swap’s own website, or via Vimeo as instructed.  Follow @windowswap at Instagram.

I like to “cast” these things from Google Chrome using its Chromecast feature, so the videos are projected to our living TV screen, but they should be viewable on any device via a browse to the Windows-Swap.com site.

Most I have seen so far show quiet scenes of solitude, sometimes with a cat or dog making its appearance and leaves gently blowing or birds flying by, or streetscapes or landscapes.  Each is identified as to the first name of the person hosting the window view and its city and country.  Here are some samples, albeit they are screen capture stills for illustration, not the motion videos of the real thing.

Jakarta, Indonesia
Cornwall, UK
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Return

Seattle to Walla Walla in four and one-half hours, in the blistering, blazing heat:

Leaving the Queen Anne District Apartment
Still in Queen Anne
Mercer Street

I-90 / Bellevue
Ellensburg
Benton City
Outside Benton City

US 12

Approaching Walla Walla
North Park Street
Howard Street, Almost Home
Touchdown
The Home Portal