Around the Sound

WILD GOOSE CHASE: We started our Monday off by piling into the car. We have been looking for used trucks that we can all four ride in to replace the truck we have now that we can't all fit in. We found one on Craigslist that sounded fantastic - so fantastic we thought it would be worth the drive to Shelton to check it out. We'd never been there before, so we were viewing it as an adventure if nothing else.

So today ended up being mostly about geography. We drove down to the ferry launch at West Seattle. From there we had a lovely view of the very snowy Olympic mountains.
We also did some bird watching. There were several ducks and cormorants and seagulls, too, of course. We even spotted four sealions swimming 'round as we crossed the sound.
It was sunny and lovely for the duration of our ferry ride - quite a departure from the monsoon this weekend and the rains that would return later this afternoon.

After landing at Southworth, we headed a bit west and then south to Shelton. Along the way, in Allyn, a big ol' bird hit our windshield with a huge scary thud. That was a bit of a shock - to us. For the bird, it most certainly proved to be a fatal mistake.

When we reached Shelton, along Puget Sound's Oakland Bay, we learned that the town calls itself the "Christmas Town USA." It was easy to see why. There were evergreens everywhere. There was also lots of logging going on, and we saw part of the enormous Simpson Timber Company operation.

We didn't stop to take any photos in Shelton, so you'll have to settle for this one circa 1925, in the University of Washington digital collection.
We wound up meeting the dude with the truck in the parking lot of the Taylor Shellfish Farms Oakland Bay operation. It won't surprise you to know that the place smelled like seafood. We saw geoducks, octopus, squid, oysters, clams, scallops, mussels and salmon. It was a seafood smorgasbord.

We also saw a really, REALLY crappy truck that was so falsely advertised it was almost amusing what a P.O.S. it was. What, like no one would notice the discrepancies between the ad and the actual thing? Oh well, onward.

Rather than returning to the ferry, we decided to drive back the I-5 route, skirting Olympia and then up through Tacoma. In the area of Ft. Lewis/McChord AFB, we got to see one military plane after another take off or land. A couple of them flew right over our car. We stopped in Tacoma to look at another truck. Though well used, compared to the last one, it was a gem.

DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?: We read a short stack of books during our travels today. One of the books I thought to bring along on the trip today was a Looney Tunes themed "Magic Eye" book. It was fully of colorful pages that, when you stare at them properly, some hidden image is supposed to emerge in 3-D. Yeah well, try as we might, neither CJ, Annabelle nor I could see anything except the crazy patterns on the page. However, Christian, for whatever reason, could very nearly instantly look at any page and could tell what the hidden object was.

Annabelle read "Olive, the Other Reindeer," to us. It's a cute story about a dog named Olive who hears the song "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," and misinterprets the line "all of the other reindeer," to mean that she is Santa's missing reindeer and she needs to get to the North Pole to help.

The third title we tackled was "How Georgie Radbourn Saved Baseball." The story starts out with slugger Boss Swaggert getting booed off the baseball field. At that, he vows to do away with the sport. After years of working to become more powerful than the U.S. president, that's exactly what he does. The problem is, when baseball is banished, spring never comes. It's perpetual winter in America.

Eventually, a babe named Georgie is born, and for reasons no one knows, the tot talks nothing but baseball. Eventually Georgie and Boss have a showdown, with the future of baseball and the U.S. hanging in the balance.

It's a suspenseful story and I loved the book's dark, kind of creepy illustrations by author/illustrator David Shannon (who grew up in Spokane, incidentally).