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Photo essay: Thompson Falls to Seattle – At last, we have arrived at the third and final (and, thankfully, shortest) photo essay from our recent trip to the Pacific Northwest. If you’re just joining us, you may want to go back and read my initial write-up of the trip, along with the first photo essay (which covers Portland to Butte) and the second photo essay (which covers Yellowstone National Park). This final essay covers the last leg of our trip, from a little town called Thompson Falls to Seattle. As with the previous essays, this one draws on a companion Imagery gallery; if you’d rather just see the pics and skip the blathering, you can head there instead. And don’t forget that, both here and in the companion gallery, you can click on the photos to get larger versions.

We left West Yellowstone relatively early on the morning of the 16th of July. Our destination for the day was northern Idaho, where my Aunt Nancy and her husband, Dennis, live in a big log house in the woods. The first part of our journey took us back the way we had come, and we ended up at Missoula once again around lunchtime. We stopped at a Cracker Barrel just outside of town; it’s something of a tradition for us to stop there at least once whenever we take a road trip in the States.

Once past Missoula, we had two possible routes: following I-90 to Coeur d’Alene and then heading north or leaving the interstate to take smaller roads northwest along the Clark Fork River. We chose the latter, and halfway to our destination we hit the town of Thompson Falls. I had been getting a little stressed during the drive, and I needed to stop, get out of the car, and cool down—metaphorically, of course, because it was blazing hot outside. Those of you who know me well will know that I do not particularly like driving. I wouldn’t say that I hate it, necessarily, but it comes nowhere my list of favorite activities. I do it if and when I have to, but if there is any other feasible way to get some place I will usually take that other way. You may be wondering why, for example, we chose to take buses from Eugene to Coos Bay, way back on the first leg of the trip. Part of it was to save money, of course, but a big part of it was that it didn’t involve me driving.

Anyway, I was very stressed—much more stressed than I usually am when driving—and I knew that I needed to deal with my mental state, so we found a little diner in Thompson Falls and ordered ice cold drinks to cool us off. I asked one of the women who was working there if there actually was a falls in town. She said yes and gave us directions, adding that it was very beautiful and worth the visit. It turned out to be not too far away, but it was so ridiculously hot out that we got back in the car and drove the couple of minutes it took to get there. We parked in a small public lot and then walked over a bridge to a wooded island and the Thompson Falls Dam.

This dam is over a hundred years old now, having originally been built in 1915. The people who built it had very little understanding of (or probably concern for) how dams affected fish habitats. As the twentieth century went on, though, it became more and more apparent that the dam was negatively affecting fish populations. At the end of the century, the government named the bull trout a threatened species. It had once been plentiful throughout the Pacific Northwest, but numbers had dwindled significantly. One of the last remaining habitats was the Clark Fork River, so, in 2009 and 2010, a fish ladder was built to allow fish to move upstream to reach their spawning waters. You can see part of that fish ladder at the very bottom of the photo.

The cold drink at the diner helped start the cooling off process, but being out in nature and just hanging out at the dam for a little while helped me shed the remainder of that stress. As I recorded in my initial write-up, I had already come to a realization: “The stress I had been feeling was not the result of my circumstances, it was the result of my reaction to my circumstances.” I put this into practice for the rest of the trip and even managed to enjoy the drive and the beautiful scenery.

We arrived at Aunt Nancy and Dennis’ house at almost exactly five o’clock, which is when we had told them to expect us. I suppose we would have arrived much earlier had we not stopped in Thompson Falls, but I am glad we did.

They have a fenced-in orchard next to their house filled with a variety of fruit trees and bushes. It might be hard to see, but here HJ is showing off—if I remember correctly—a red Anjou pear. Dennis is also here, out of frame, harvesting quite a few delicious berries for us to eat.

We went for a walk around the neighborhood and around their property, which is quite large. Here, we are almost back at the house, which you can see in the background; you can also see the gate into the orchard in the upper left. HJ decided to take a seat on this little stone bench while Dennis demonstrated the proper technique for holding up a tree. Aunt Nancy had taken a different route, and we all met up back at the house.

For dinner on our second and last night there, Dennis made up some pizza dough and everyone made their own pie with custom toppings. These were then cooked in their propane-fired (at least I think that’s what it was) pizza oven outside. This is my pizza shortly after it went into the oven. It came out great and tasted great thanks to Dennis’ skill in dough-making.

I have long thought that one day I might want a pizza oven; I’ve even had wild dreams of building my own wood-fired brick oven. That is unrealistic, of course, unless we move someplace where we end up with actual land that we can build stuff on. Even then, I wonder if I would really want to build a wood-fired oven. It’s an awful lot of work to get the oven hot enough where you can actually bake a pizza, and how often would I make pizza anyway? Maybe more if I had such an oven, but maybe not. A propane-fired oven seems like a good compromise... but if I’m being perfectly honest, I think I’m OK with a good regular oven and a pizza steel. It’s not quite the same, of course, but it might be good enough.

We had a great time with Aunt Nancy and Dennis, and it was good to see them again after so long. It had been twenty-five years since our last visit; hopefully we’ll be able to see them again far sooner than that. I did take more pictures than these three, of course, but this was family time for us, so I’ll leave it at that.

I discussed the final drive to Seattle and our return of the car in a fair amount of detail in the trip write-up, so I won’t rehash that here. Instead, I’ll just say that we stopped for lunch in a small town called Moses Lake. We had more of a brunch than a lunch at a place called Mom & Pop’s Diner. I mention it by name because it was pretty good; if you ever happen to be driving through the area and get a hankering for biscuits and gravy or steak and eggs, it’s worth a stop.

Our hotel was not too far away from the rental place, so we rolled our bags up the street (it was up, unfortunately, rather than down), checked in, and then headed out for dinner. We didn’t do much that first evening, as I was quite tired from the drive. The next morning, though, we walked out to the waterfront (Puget Sound). This photograph was taken from the outdoor upper level of the ferry terminal, looking north toward the piers and the Great Wheel in the background. We walked north along the waterfront for a while, mostly just taking in the sunshine.

We did make one stop, at a place called “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop.” (Incidentally, the first two words of the shop name are pronounced “the old,” not “yee oldie”; the “Y” stands in for a thorn (þ), which represents the “th” sound.) It is an obvious tourist trap, but we thought we would drop in and see what they had because we were... curious. Most of the stuff is tourist nick-knacks and tchotchkes, but toward the rear of the shop they had some cabinets with genuinely weird and interesting things that had apparently been around for quite a while.

This figure here, as you might be able to tell from the card between his feet, is Sylvester. He is a mummified or preserved human being that died sometime in the late nineteenth century at the latest. Nobody knows who he was, although theories and legends abound. One theory is that the body was the creation of a famous con artist, but MR and CT scans conducted in the 21st century show that Sylvester is—or was—an actual human being. The wildest theory is that this is John Wilkes Booth, although that seems unlikely. In the cabinet next to this is a preserved female named Sylvia. It’s all a bit grotesque, but it is kind of fascinating, too.

This is Pike Place Market, which we walked by but didn’t really stop in. We had been to the market on our last trip to Seattle—granted, that was twenty-five years ago, but it was Sunday when we visited this time and there were way too many people around. We had lunch somewhere nearby before heading south toward Pioneer Square and a tour of underground Seattle.

And here we are, underneath modern-day Seattle at what used to be the ground floor of the city. A fire destroyed much of the area in 1889, and city officials saw it as an opportunity to solve the problem of tidal flooding that plagued that part of the city. They raised the streets, leaving the old sidewalks open beneath them. People continued to use these underground sidewalks for a while, lit as they were by vault lights (basically skylights set into the sidewalks) that are still around today, but eventually they fell out of use. A local journalist rediscovered the underground city in the 1960s, and tours have been running in his name ever since. There are other companies that run underground tours, but we figured we would go with the original. I cannot make comparisons, since we only went on this one tour, but it was very entertaining and enjoyable.

This is a totem pole in Pioneer Square; as you might imagine, totem poles are a common motif around the city, given their prevalence in Pacific Northwest tribal culture. I won’t say much about them except to say that there are a lot of misunderstandings about them. One of these is reflected in the old phrase “low man on the totem pole.” If you are the low man on the totem pole, you are the least important or least powerful person in a group—because everyone else is on top of you. In reality, though, the most important element in a totem pole is often on the bottom; sometimes the vertical arrangement doesn’t matter at all. Either way, being the literal low man on the totem pole doesn’t mean what you might have thought.

This is a bust of Chief Seattle, a leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples—and, of course, the namesake of the city. He was friendly with the white settlers who founded the city here and formed personal relationships with some of the prominent members of American society. His story is too long to be told here, but it is a fascinating part of Seattle’s history. This bust is also in Pioneer Square (in fact, you can see part of it in the previous photo above if you look closely).

This is the gate to Seattle’s Chinatown in the Chinatown-International District southeast of Pioneer Square. Very little remains of the original neighborhood today; there is a balcony nearby done in the Chinese style, but according to a nearby information board that is the last visible sign of what the neighborhood originally looked like. This was our last stop for the day, and we walked back to our hotel from here, stopping for dinner along the way.

The next morning—our last full day in Seattle—we got up early and headed out to the Space Needle, which isn’t far from our hotel. As I wrote in the trip write-up, we had originally intended to get tickets for an evening visit, but when we saw that they were going to be significantly more expensive than morning tickets, we decided to go up right then and there.

We are up on the observation deck now, looking out over the city to the northeast. The views from the top of the tower were expansive; the weather was nice, and the air was pretty clear, too. The body of water you can see is Lake Union, so named presumably because it joins Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west.

Here, we are looking south, with Puget Sound off to the right. In the center you can see rails or beams running through the city; these are for the monorail that runs between the Space Needle and the Westlake Central shopping center. You can also see our hotel in this photo. If you look on the left-hand side of the photo, you’ll see a yellow crane rising above the surrounding buildings. There is an empty lot to the left of that, with trees to the left (that’s Denny Park) and buildings beyond it, toward the background. The smallest of those buildings, nestled to the right of a building with white horizontal strips separating rows of windows, is our hotel. It was a pretty good deal, especially for being as centrally located as it was. We walked almost everywhere, with the exception of our one ride on the monorail, and that was more for the experience of riding the monorail than anything else.

After doing some shopping at the Westlake Central shopping center, we walked back to our hotel and rested for a bit. In the afternoon we headed back out again and walked north to Lake Union. As I mentioned in the write-up, we didn’t really have time to visit the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), but there were some benches behind the museum that were a nice place to sit and watch the seaplanes land and take off again. Oh, that’s right: The lake is basically an airport for seaplanes. You can see one coming in for a landing in the photo above. There must be a lot of careful coordination—there were quite a few boats on the lake, and the planes would fly right over them as they came and went.

Also on the lake is the Historic Ships Wharf, where a number of ships are tied up. From left to right, you can see the Virginia V, the Arthur Foss, and the Swiftsure. Virginia V is a steamer that plied the waters around Seattle from 1922 to 1938 to ferry people from smaller coastal communities to the bigger cities of Seattle and Tacoma. The boat had several owners through the 1950s until she was bought by a group of steamboat enthusiasts in 1968 and placed on the National Registry of Historic Site in 1973. She was restored beginning in 1995 and returned to service in 2002; you can apparently charter the ship for trips, although they also have public excursions.

The Arthur Foss is a wooden steam tug built in 1889 as the Wallowa in Portland, Oregon; it originally worked on the Columbia River. It was bought by the Foss Launch & Tug Company in 1929, after which she played the tugboat Narcissus in the 1933 film Tugboat Annie. Following this, she was rebuilt as a diesel vessel and renamed the Arthur Foss. She served as a Navy vessel during World War II and then went back to work as a tug until 1968; today, she is a floating museum.

Finally, the Swiftsure is a steam lightship built in 1904 in Camden, New Jersey. This was before the completion of the Panama Canal, so the ship had to travel all the way down to South America and around Cape Horn before making the journey back north to reach the west coast. Today, it is the oldest lightship in the United States, and the only one to still have its original steam engine. Lightships, if you’re not familiar with them, were ships anchored offshore to serve as floating lighthouses. There haven’t been any active lightships in over forty years since automated systems rendered them obsolete; those that are left, including Swiftsure, function as museums.

This is the museum, with the historic ships in the background. Like I said, we didn’t have time to see the exhibits, but it is something I would like to do if and when we make it back to Seattle. I did read some online reviews panning the “Bezos Center for Innovation,” an exhibit that was added in 2013 thanks to a hefty gift from Amazon founder and slimy lizard person Jeff Bezos, but otherwise it is supposed to be worth a visit.

After returning from Lake Union, we headed out one last time to walk around the area where the Space Needle is located, which is known as the Seattle Center; this is the Needle from ground level to bookend the earlier photos from atop it.

This is the Pacific Science Center. Again, we didn’t have time to go inside, as it was already quite late in the afternoon, but I did find the architecture of the place to be rather interesting. It reminded me of Middle Eastern architecture, somehow, and I thought the juxtaposition of the facade and the city in the background was interesting.

We continued our walk through the Seattle Center and on to dinner and drinks at a local pub. The waitress there was nice enough to give us directions to a pedestrian overpass that would lead us to the sound and a nice park that runs along the waterfront.

The evening sun is beginning to set here as a young man casts a line into the sound, hoping to catch something. We were content to just take in the last of the golden sunlight and the views out over the water.

And this is one of those views out over the water. It probably doesn’t need too much explanation beyond that.

This last photo, however, probably does need some explanation. We had walked southeast along the waterfront until we reached the Olympic Sculpture Park, an outdoor sculpture museum with a lot of interesting works. This one in particular caught my eye. You may be able to guess that it features the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, cast in bronze. Seven of the animals are recreations of sculptures at Emperor Qianlong’s palace near Beijing; the remaining five were created by the artist.

It was the name of the artist that really caught my eye, though. I looked at the sign and then said to HJ, “Oh, this is by Ai Weiwei!” To my surprise, she wasn’t familiar with the name. When I explained who he was, she said she thought she remembered hearing about him, but she wasn’t familiar with his works. Truth be told, I can’t say I’m all that familiar with his work as an artist, either—I only really know him as a political activist.

From the park we made our way back to our hotel for our final night in Seattle, and the next day we headed to the airport for the flight back to Seoul. And with that, we at long last reach the end of this retrospective on our trip. The trip itself lasted a little over three weeks, but it’s taken me well over a month to get all of this done (including the initial write-up). It’s no wonder I never get around to doing this after we return from a trip. I think next time I may just select a handful of photos to post and not bother with the companion galleries and separate photo essays. It took way longer to prepare all of this than I had thought it would. I don’t regret going into detail with the photos and my thoughts on them, especially for the Yellowstone leg, but I probably won’t be doing this again. I hope you enjoyed it, though.