We’ve also picked up an old project that we abandoned a few years ago for health reasons, and so I have been very busy with research and design work related to that.  I don’t think I have taken a photograph since we arrived.

We will be leaving in a couple weeks, travelling north and arriving eventually in my home town of Kitimat, where we will stay for a while.

That’s about all the news I have.

Frank.

We’ve just spent our last weekend here, taking in the July 4th festivities before we head further north tomorrow.  The QBRC folks flexed their party muscles with free entertainment on Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday we were treated to an outdoor concert by Mickey Thomas and Starship, the current incarnation through a path too complicated for mere mortals to understand of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship.

The concert got off to a slow start.  It must take a lot of courage to put yourself out there in front of a crowd that is just sort of sitting like a lumps on the beach.  The audio quality didn’t help much … we heard lots of bass but the treble wasn’t quite right.  That may have been due to the venue, which was outside directly next to a big flat wall (the hotel).

Regardless, they kept at it and eventually the crowd warmed up.  By the end of the performance the magic was happening and a good time was had by all.

Sunday was of course fireworks day, and I have to wonder how many thousands or millions of dollars went up in smoke.  I thought I had seen fireworks before, but wow, this was something else!

QBRC is a few miles down the beach from the town of Ocean Shores, and near as I can tell that whole stretch and more on either side was covered by vehicles settled in to launch fireworks.  Hours before dark already fireworks were going off in the hundreds.  I confess I don’t understand that – I couldn’t see much more than the smoke!

But it continued as the light faded (and late into the night) and for hours there were near continuous fireworks for miles.

I thought the resort’s contribution would be more of the same, perhaps with more coordination, or greater numbers of fireworks.  Boy was I wrong … there was no comparison!  The booms were louder, the flashes were bigger, and the sky was filled with a spectacular light show.

The whole event was so overwhelming I was laughing from sheer giddiness at times.  You haven’t seen fireworks until you’ve seen them done like this!

Tomorrow, if things go as planned, we will settle into the Seattle area for a few days before crossing back into Canada and into the lower mainland area.  We both have friends and family there that we haven’t seen for a while so I am quite looking forward to that.

The day was a typical rain forest day — mostly cloudy and with a sprinkle of rain now and again.  In this part of the world they measure the annual rainfall in feet rather than inches, and it comes out to twelve feet per year.  What a contrast to the parts of the southwest we visited where three inches or less of rain each year is not uncommon!

We drove around Quinault Lake and stopped at Willaby Creek to take pictures of the falls.  Frank took lots of photos of the falls and I took lots of photos of Frank taking photos.    We saw the biggest spruce tree in the world (Frank’s hometown of Kitimat has the biggest spruce tree in Canada, but apparently the Washington tree is larger), and the biggest cedar tree, too.  The biggest Douglas fir is also in that area, but we didn’t happen upon it (we stayed pretty close to the road).  Here are a few of the photos I took:

Willaby Creek Falls

Frank clambering up for a better view of the falls

I liked the quiet peace of this view

Here's Frank standing inside the biggest cedar, which is mostly hollow at the bottom but still very green at the top

The sand part of the event has to do with the building of sand castles and other sand sculptures.  They do a great job of setting up for this.   All down the beach pits had been dug several feet down giving contestants both a nearby source of water and a mound of loose sand.

The contestants have the better part of a day to work on their creations, and all skill levels are represented.

Some folks used very simple tools:

Other people came with forms, sprayers, and various other special purpose tools:

I particularly liked that they had a category for family teams.  What a great way to spend a day with family!  Even those who were not officially competing got into the action.

Anyone know what kind of dog this is?  It has the look of  husky, but it is an order of magnitude smaller.

Never having attended one of these events before, I was surprised and impressed by what was created.

We could particularly relate to this one.

The sawdust part of the festival was all about chainsaw carvings, and again I was impressed.  Contestants came from as far away as Germany to show what they could do.  I had to chuckle at some of the creative marketing too.

This was not a quiet event.  The sound of chainsaws and other power tools bombards you from all sides.

It was fun watching the carvers at work.

Many of the carvings were quite good, at least to my unskilled eye.

All in all a fun filled event that I m glad we attended.

Happy Father’s Day Dad, from both of us.

When we decided years ago, before we considered travelling as we now are, to sell the farm, I had three goals in mind, or better said, three criteria for our next home. It was to be closer to our friends so that it would be easier to see more of them. It was to be closer to community activities such as continuing education courses, yoga classes, etc. so that Nicole could get out of the house and get some social contact more easily. And it absolutely needed to have at least two different kinds of broadband Internet access available so that I could have two providers and use when one the other was degraded or broken. With so much of what I do dependant on connectivity, poor quality service had been a source of tremendous frustration for years and I just wasn’t going to put up with it anymore.

And then we got the idea to travel. First it was going to be a year between the selling of our house and the purchase of the next one. Then it was a couple years, potentially becoming more depending how we like it.

There is a lot to like about it. Less than half a year in we have seen some amazing things. We have a tiny living space that is easy to maintain but large enough to do most of what we want to do. Our living costs are super low. For the past month our utility and residence expenses, equivalent to rent, mortgage, property tax, power and water bills, has been under $100. We are used to thinking of financial security as being about having money, but having low expenses is another way to do it, and will be a great help as I launch the next phase of my working life.

But how am I doing on my three part plan for a happier life?

Not so good really. My friends are now thousands of miles away instead of an inconvenient drive. Involvement with community is now much harder than ever. And did I mention that my Internet access is slow again today?

In the eastern part of the US we found many campgrounds that with a Passport America discount could be had for $10 to $15 per night. We more or less boondocked half time and stayed at such places the other half, doing any bandwidth intensive things like Youtube or iTunes updates only while on wifi and using cellular data when boondocking.

That was great, but it does not translate to the west coast. Camping fees are much higher here, and PA discounts are less often offered and usually only for a night or two, so we have been boondocking a lot more.

We try to keep the downloading to visits to coffee shops with wifi but the quality is highly variable and recently I have given up at more than one place and left with my download queue still bulging. And even so we are bumping up against the 5GB monthly limit on our Verizon mifi. It is important not to exceed that, because the rate for additional usage is literally five times higher than for the first 5 gigs.

I did a little surfing the other day to look into mobile satellite connectivity. The place I found charged $6500 for equipment and installation, with monthly fees being $89 and up after that. I don’t know yet if that is typical, but it is a lot more than I expected for the gear and install. I am seriously considering buying a carton of mifis and rotating through them as a solution to the 5 gig cap. Pain in the ass, but still a lot less expensive than the satellite solution.

That of course would not address coverage and data rate issues. There does not seem to be a perfect solution for nomads like us.

Contemplating breakfast....

I’d forgotten how much longer the daylight portion of the day is when one is farther north.  The sun rises before 5:30 am and doesn’t set until almost 9:30 pm.  It’s a noticeable difference from where we were a week or two ago, even taking the lengthening daylight into account.  The wind is pretty constant here, and it’s been fairly cool (a local paper had an article in it that quoted kids’ advice to visitors — “bring a warm jacket” was a recurring suggestion).  We had a rainy day, too, which was a treat after all the dry desert we’ve seen recently.

We get in at least one walk on the beach every day.  Even in the wind and the rain, the sea has a way of calming down your thoughts.  Yesterday the city of Ocean Shores had a Flag Day parade (not very thought-calming), which featured an amazing number of pirates (“parties, occasions and invasions” were a specialty of one pirate band).  Today Frank and I are going to a charity benefit CrabFest (all you can eat buffet!) put on by the Quinault Beach Resort and Casino, our hosts.  Crabs and clams seem to be plentiful here, going by what washes up on the beach.  I trust our buffet will feature “caught” rather than “collected” seafood.

Frank’s been taking pictures and I’ve been doing some painting; life here has quickly settled in to a comfortable routine.  Beach living is good….

I know that some of our readers are looking for RV boondocking information, so here’s the scoop:  the casino (check the link above for directions) has a separate parking lot (gravel, not especially level, large enough for any rig) for RVers.  The parking lot is about a five minute walk from the beach.  Register at the front desk on your way in.  There are no hookups, but there is a garbage dumpster.  You can dump and fill at the state park next door, or in town behind the municipal permits building at 710 Pt Brown Ave NE (it’s free there; I’m not sure what the park charges).

Here are a couple more photos from the beach:

Puddles on the beach

Action shot of Frank

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

It is time I suppose to reveal the subject of mystery photo number three.  Walking across a parking lot with recently repainted parking spot lines a few weeks ago I found a paint spill that had developed an interesting pattern as it dried.  Nicole is quite used to me photographing the oddest things and understand that I simply had to stop and take its picture.  Thanks to all who shared their guesses!  I’ll have something new for you in a few minutes.  In the meantime, a couple photographs from my walk today.

Not too far north of Lone Pine, California is a national historical site called Manzanar.  Once an area of farms and ranches (it’s named from the Spanish word for apple orchard), in 1942 it became a “war relocation center” where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were housed in 504 hastily-built barracks.  They were allowed to bring only what they could carry with them, leaving all the rest of their lives behind, either abandoned or sold at well below their worth.

I went to Manzanar thinking it would be an interesting visit, but it turned out to be emotionally moving, as well.  The 500 acre housing section of the camp was surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.  The barracks couldn’t keep out the summer heat, winter cold, or dust from wind storms.  The internees made the best of their situation and built gardens, ran a dojo, Buddhist temples, a newspaper, stores and a school.  They had highschool cheerleaders, sports, musical programs, and dances.  A major occupation in the camp was making camouflage netting for the war effort.  Some of the young men enlisted in the military and had to return to the internment camp if they wanted to visit their families.  Manzanar War Relocation center was closed in 1945.  The residents were not allowed to return to their original homes, but resettled elsewhere.

The site itself is mainly row after row of foundations of the barracks and other buildings.  There is a graveyard just outside the barbed wire, and a little pet graveyard to the side of that (internees were not allowed to bring their pets with them, but adopted mice, lizards and stray cats at the camp).  There is an interpretive center in the big auditorium building that was built in 1944, and a barracks is being reconstructed, and one guard tower has also been reconstructed.  It’s hard to imagine, looking at the mostly empty, rather desolate area, that once it was a good-sized city with block after block of buildings and many inhabitants.  The day we were there, the wind was rushing through the bushes and trees, blowing around the dust and the paper origami cranes that are left in the graveyard to honour the dead.  What must this place have looked like to the people that were torn from all they knew and suddenly dropped here in this remote, harsh landscape?  Imagining it saddens me….