Another reason to hate fords

Day 27

The day started out with a breakfast scramble, and ended with a delicious meal lentil soup and pasta with scallops prepared by Micah’s cousins Nels and Alton, and by her aunt Rebecca. But where are we? Well, we left the campsite and drove north to Issaquah (just east of Seattle), where Micah has family. The drive was uneventful. Grey, rainy, long, boring. But we especially want to make the drive because her grandma Ruth is visiting and it would be nice to see her. Micah’s family is incredibly nice, and they all (save Grandma Ruth) love to cook, which fits perfectly with my love to eat. Alton is studying the art of bread-making so there’s always fresh bread around. No complaints from an avid carbo-loader.

Day 28

One of those days. I’m grumpy. I pretty much scare Micah out of the van, so she spends the morning indoors with her cousins while I stay in the van and read and try not to think about my grumpiness. But it’s hard! Vonnegut helps me out a whole heck of a lot because his writing is a perfect escape, but I remain fairly grumpy the entire morning, and don’t really improve until late in the afternoon when we drive into downtown Issaquah for some beer. We also elect to have 2 different kinds of fried potatoes, which boosts my happiness level considerably. I don’t want to be food-dependent, but French fried potatoes (and what I think they called Idaho fried potatoes) seem to strike that soft spot in my heart that melts away the cold, grumpy outer layer. Anyway, the day is very uneventful, but the beer with Micah’s cousin Nels was fun, and I go to bed less cranky than I woke up, so at least I made some progress on that front.

Day 29

Refreshed! I’m not a total ass this morning (which bodes well for people forced to interact with me (or wake up next to me)) and the weather is nice enough that we can run our errands by biking into town. The ride isn’t too terribly long (8 miles), but the entire way there is down hill, and since they (meaning stupid lazy people) haven’t invented a way to temporarily tilt the earth in the other direction to allow people to always travel downhill when their legs run out of energy, we are forced to bike back 8 miles of mostly steady uphill. Of course I manage to complicate matters by noticing that my front tire is somewhat deflated by the time I get to town. Luckily (thanks to Matt Smith’s rigorous bike training) I know to always bring a tire pump with me. So I take it out of my backpack. And I look at it. And I notice that the little hose portion is dangling like a limp noodle (or any other flaccid protuberance). Totally broken. Ah-hah! But I have also learned (from a certain electricly-minded father type unit) to always have electrical tape with me (for bandaging wounds and such). So I bust out the tape and start to repair the tubing. I do an amazing job. And I start to pump the tire. And it doesn’t fill up so much as it deflates even more. Something that hadn’t occurred to me: it’s not easy to make things air tight. For some reason I thought that it was easy. My tape job looked superb. Bottom line: I had to buy a new pump. Lame. But, as the cheap-ass that I am, I couldn’t make this part easy either. Even though we were in REI buying things we needed for our upcoming backpacking trip, and even though REI had bike pumps, I refused to pay their outrageous price of $12 for a pump. How could they charge so much?? It pumps air! Thus, my stubbornness made us walk over to Target for a better deal. How much was the pump? $10.66. Take that, REI! I knew their merchandise was overpriced.

But since I took so long doing all that crap we had to bike really fast back to the van because we were planning on driving to Seattle to meet up with a friend of Hannah’s (Micah’s sister) who had to work at like 5. So we hustled our asses up the 8 mile hill and were then slowed down by the desperate need to shower before interacting with other humans, so we only just barely made it to Seattle in time to meet Chelsea and wave goodbye as she went to work as a longshoreman. And then we relaxed on Chelsea’s couch (I got to watch sports!) until we (Micah) got a text from Chelsea saying she didn’t get work and would be back shortly. So we ended up making delicious burritos together along with her bagpipe playing Scottish husband Brian. They have one of those heat lamps that they have at outdoor restaurants and bars on their back patio, and we get to eat our burritos outside in the rain.

Day 30

We wake up lazily (in that we didn’t leave the house until the afternoon), and then head into downtown Seattle with Chelsea as our guide. We go to Pike’s market to look for a very specific bracelet that Micah remembers from like four years ago, and when she finds the people that used to sell them they appropriately respond “we used to sell those like four years ago. What took you so long?” So that mission is a failure. It’s a compounded failure because in finding parking Chelsea accidentally backed into a pole made out of cement, which didn’t move when struck by the bumper. It was unfortunate, and reminded me a great deal about the lesson I learned when backing into the unyielding backhoe.

We then head to Capitol Hill, where the gays, hippies, and emo kids collect (as well as a very amazing older man in an all yellow suit with a died pink and orange beard). We walk around and see very little that’s exciting so we go to a place that Chelsea had been wanted to go to for like 5 months but never made it: Pike St. Fish Fry. I dare you to figure out what they have on the menu. Give up? Oh, I’m sorry, that was your guess? Ha! Wrong, stupid. It’s fish! Fried fish. It was very good.

We then went to this other area of Seattle (south Seattle) in Columbia City to this place called King Donuts. I’m not even going to make you guess this one because it’s too hard, but they have (in addition to donuts), teriyaki chicken, and a laundromat. We got a half dozen donuts, sat down, ate some of each, listened to a short sermon by a black dude who spoke of Jesus in baseball terms (like rounding first), and took our leave.

Since we felt bad after all the fried food we stopped at a local farmers’ market and bought vegetables to make a salad for dinner. Which we did.

Our after dinner festivities included watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a classic I haven’t seen in like 15 years), and going to an open mike at this awesome dive-bar where a guy was playing guitar and his groupie (yes, singular) repeatedly went up and took pictures of him. Also she was overweight and was wearing Daisy-dukes. The night ended with our own private concert of Brain playing the bagpipes, which was really fucking cool.

Day 31

Micah and I sort of do our own thing around Seattle, which isn’t much. We prepare for our camping trip by getting food and rainproof pants for me. We wanted to go canoeing in the arboretum near Washington University, but it’s graduation day (annoying), and there’s nowhere to park nearby, so we go for a walk instead. It’s nice, but then it starts to rain and we head back. We made salmon cakes and went out for ice cream at this place called Full Tilt that also had arcade games (my favorite!), but there was a horde of screaming little girls doing birthday nonsense and their ear-shattering shrieks drove us out. They even had The Twilight Zone pinball game, which was one of my favorites from my Arcata days. Too bad.

Day 32

We leave Seattle early and head off into the wilderness out by Lake Cle Elum. The weather is mother f’ing perfect for the first time all trip, and the gods smile upon us. This is my very first backpacking adventure, and the absence of rain makes me believe this was meant to be. We’ve had rain all trip, and we now get to experience some true sun and summer weather. We are hiking into Lake Waptus, which is a 9 mile hike, staying two nights, and hiking back out.

The hike in hurts my shoulders. I feel like my backpack’s weight should be more evenly distributed to my hips and chest, but my shoulders feel like they’re taking the brunt. It’s an interesting hike though. We go through rocky terrain, forest, swampland, and snow. Part of the reason that we picked this area is because snow is down around 3500 feet pretty much everywhere, and this was one of the few places that had backpacking at or lower than 3500. But we still hit some snow. It’s not cold where we’re hiking, but some areas just never get sun.

It’s all going smooth enough (although my shoulders do hurt and my little pinky toes do too) until we reach an area where we have to cross the Waptus River, and the bridge is out. Solution: use the horse ford. Problem: there is no rope. The river is ice cold, it’s fast moving, it’s up past our thighs, and the bottom is rocky. It’s treacherous as all hell and halfway through I kind of want to just give up and float away. But we do in fact make it. Our feet are numb, Micah’s legs are bright pink, we’re soaked, and we kind of want to be at the campsite already. It’s not too far past the river fording, but it seems like it’s forever. It feels so good to take off the packs and make some dinner (dehydrated refried beans). Plus, we see something I’ve never seen before: a beaver! (the mammal kind). It’s pretty awesome to see it swimming in the lake in almost complete darkness. We don’t stay up much past the beaver sighting. Sleeping hurts, but our view out the tent onto the lake and the snowy mountains beyond are worth the stiffness.

Day 33

We enjoy the beautiful nature around us by doing very little. We wake up pretty late (I blame exhaustion), and we tinker around the campsite, reading, sitting in the sun, and me jumping into and out of the icy cold lake. All my external bits shrivel up and nearly disappear, but hanging out naked in the sun helps.

We take a small walk around the lake, but don’t even make it a quarter of the way before we decide that it’s too much. So we climb out onto a log floating in the lake and sit and relax. It’s perfect weather - not a cloud in the sky. We just sit and enjoy each other’s company without really having to worry about anything real.

We get back to camp and make lunch (thai noodles), and sit in the sun and watch a chipmunk scamper about. OH. And this relates to Day 32: when we got to camp and started unpacking I turned away from my pack for a couple of minutes and a chipmunk managed to get inside, eat some bagel, and make two poops. What a little jerk! But he is pretty cute and we soon become friends. Back to Day 33: We hang out on a log and watch the clouds get caught on the mountain on the other side of the lake. The sun starts going down so we make dinner (dehydrated curry lentils) and some hot cocoa. We’re both a little sad that we have to leave the next day, but we don’t want any rangers coming and looking for us, so we don’t have much of a choice. Plus, this was just a backpacking trial run to get me started and figure out what we need to do a little bit more efficiently on our bigger adventure.

Day 34

It’s Micah’s birthday, but I don’t really have anything to give her but a hike back. She doesn’t mind though. A birthday out backpacking is pretty sweet. The hike out isn’t as bad. Someone put up a rope to use for crossing the icy river of death, and since it’s early in the hike, the rest seems to be quite easy. Until the end when my everything starts to hurt. I have no clue how people put the backpacks on every day and keep going. I’d much rather hike one or two days, and then stop for a few days without wearing the pack before hiking back out. But even though my everything hurts, we make it out alive, and I’m a better person for it.

We stop in the town of Roslyn for a celebratory birthday/backpacking success beer. The little bar in town has an outside area that literally looks like some poor dude’s backyard. There were pieces of furniture falling apart, the ground was just dirt, there was some garbage over in one corner, and the people hanging out there looked like they’d been there all day. In fact, two of them might have been, as they were already drunk. One of them invited us to a barbeque at his house. There was actually some funny lead up to this where a couple other people came into the back area and started talking to him, and the conversation ended with him saying “I guess I just got invited to a barbeque at my house.” And then he invited us. The other guy back there mentioned how he drinks 10 beers a day, and the doctors tell him he’s in perfect physical health. To point: “I have no cholesterol, 50 beats per minute, and no blood pressure.” Micah pointed out how he must have some blood pressure, a point he conceded.

We then drove back to Issaquah where we had birthday dinner and cake with Micah’s family. It was great, but we were exhausted and wanted to go to sleep very badly. It was a great birthday, full of familiar and odd company alike. I didn’t have a present since I already gave her a bike, so that was somewhat anticlimactic, but it couldn’t be helped. Happy Birthday, Micah.

**Note on the first month: I spent a total of $5.33 sleeping. That was one night of camping at $16, split 3 ways. Other than that (including backpacking, which was free as well thank to the National Park Pass) we haven't spent a dime. Pretty awesome.**