Month: September 2025

Friday, September 19th

E made baklava today. We each had a little taste, just to make sure that it was good enough to share at tomorrow’s dinner at J and B’s. It passed the test.

Saturday, September 20th

We did something new today, attending an event called the Luckiamute River Paddle. Organized by the Luckiamute Watershed Council, the event included an hour and a half of canoeing on the river. A few of the twenty or so participants brought their own paddle boards or kayaks, but most of us were in canoes provided by the organizers. We put in to the river from Crocker Road on the edge of the Luckiamute Natural Area about half a mile from the place where the Luckiamute joins the Willamette. Just a few minutes later we shot out of the swift-moving Luckiamute and were caught up in the currents and eddies of the mighty Willamette. From there we paddled more than forty miles north, reaching Canby, Oregon early in the morning of the following day. Hmm…that can’t be right. Because didn’t we actually start paddling upstream in the Luckiamute, away from the Willamette? And for most of the way wasn’t the Luckiamute more like a long narrow pond than a river? Well yes, we suppose it was.

There are no dams on the Luckiamute and sometimes in the spring it is a mighty river, too dangerous for any watercraft. But these days it is supremely peaceful. We paddled across a few deep spots, but for most of the trip the water was only a few feet deep. Our guides explained that if we did happen to fall out of our boat, we should just remember to stand up and we’d be fine.

We suspect that most of the participants knew a lot more about canoeing we did–cuz we didn’t know much! But just in case, the guides did go over some of the basics before we started. They told us that the paddler in the rear is responsible for steering while the front paddler mainly just provides motive force. As a corollary, the person in the back was basically in charge of the boat and would have to guide and instruct the front paddler. So this was our first dilemma. E had spent a lot of time in canoes; M had spent almost zero. So surely E should be in the rear seat. E, however, refused, claiming that her time in canoes had focused only on the duties of being a passenger and that she had never gotten involved in such arcane matters as paddling or steering. So M took the rear.

You may be wondering how this went. Pretty well, you might say. We did not turn the canoe over, we kept up with the group, we did not bump into the shore or into other canoes, at least not very hard, and only once did we get branches in our faces from being too close to the riverside willows. We did have some problems in the chain of command, however. For one thing M–as the back paddler–was quite willing to give instructions to the front paddler but couldn’t figure out what instructions he was supposed to give. Also, E wasn’t really listening, so it wasn’t clear if his instructions were going to get through anyway. She was a powerful paddler, though, and did some share of the steering by herself. Only at one point did she turn around and direct herself to M: “When,” she demanded, “are we going to get to do ramming speed?”

In the evening following all this excitement, we went to dinner at J and B’s house, picking up our friend C on the way. It was a cooperative Greek themed meal. The hosts contributed spanakopita and wine while C–well known gal about town and a Greece area expert–provided dolmas and Greek salad. E brought along the baklava. Another very nice evening.

Sunday, September 21st

M has got himself involved in not one but two backyard projects, one to convert a hundred or two square feet of grass into some kind of planting beds and another to build eight feet of curved walkway out of pavers. Progress is slow. E, meanwhile, went out to the nursery and came home with new plants: two sedums and a gaura.

We’ve also been spending time reading. E’s latest favorite is The Sound of a Wild Snail Chewing, which was recommended to her by friend S. It is narrated by a woman who was bedridden for several months and whose only constant companion was a snail living in a flower pot next to her bed. Her observations and the facts she researched have changed E’s attitude towards snails from one of repulsion to one of admiration. For example, who knew that a snail has thousands of teeth? And that it can hold its fertilized eggs for months until the right conditions appear to lay them?

M has been immersed in the second and third volumes of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, two very long novels about goings on in the late 17th and early 18th centuries with special focus on diplomacy, court intrigues, piracy, slavery, ship building, alchemy, natural science, the development of international financial trading systems, the question of whether Leibnitz or Newton deserves to be known as the inventor of calculus, and quite a few other things. Also, there’s some excellent swashbuckling and a long term love story–very long term. All in all, these books are awfully interesting, but, as one reader put it, they’re not what you would call brisk.

Monday, September 22nd

Grocery shopping and garden work today. In the evening we dropped in to the old Darkside Theater, something we haven’t done for a while. We were there to see Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. Many of us had a surfeit of DA a few years ago, but here in 2025 we have to say that Julian Fellowes can still deliver the goods. It was a great story, with all the old characters and the original actors. Maggie Smith, of course, has passed away, so the movie opens with everyone mourning the death of Mama. Nice cars, lovely clothes, several serious challenges. Can they be surmounted?

Tuesday to Friday, September 23rd to 26th

The weather is fine but it definitely feels like fall. We expanded E’s front flower bed and she got her new plants in the ground. M needs some rain to soften the ground, but we’re not getting much. Seems like we have tons of appointments and busywork these days. (But we can usually find time for a nap sometime in the PM.)

Monday, September 8th

We set off today for the San Juan Islands. Given that the San Juans are in the northeast corner of Washington, almost in Canada, it promised to be a long trip. We knew we ought to start early–or at least early-ish. As we pulled out of the driveway, E took note of the time: 7:37 AM. We were in the new Kia EV6, which still had only a few hundred miles on it. We’ll fix that!

Driving an EV on a road trip requires some planning and we were nervous because we had never taken a long EV trip before. The EV6, like most newer EV’s, comes with a Tesla style charging port and can access the Tesla network of fast chargers. There are plenty of those along the I-5 from Corvallis on up to Canada. One of our esteemed readers had told us that Tesla chargers were easy to use, and he was surely right. The islands are about 350 miles away and our car’s range is somewhere around 280. So, you might think that we’d only need to recharge once on the way. Yeah…well, not exactly.

Anyway, off we went. We had to get through Salem during the morning rush, but it wasn’t too bad. We got to Portland around 9:00 and found that traffic there was moving right along. Soon we crossed the old bridge over the Columbia River (roll on, Columbia, roll on) and left Oregon. So that was the first 85 miles accomplished. Then we had the long slog up through most of the state of Washington, which was going to take a while. Around noon we stopped to charge up somewhere around Tacoma. While the car charged, we got out to stretch our legs. The charging location was in a newish shopping center complex, the kind of place that’s very convenient to drive to, but decidedly not pedestrian friendly. We found that out when we tried to walk over to a Safeway to get some potato chips to go with our lunch. We got ’em, though, despite having to push through acres of tar macadam. We ate our lunch and got back on the road. The next big town was Seattle. Seattle used to be famous for terrible traffic; but we found that if all you want to do is go straight on through, it’s currently not bad at all.

By then it was early afternoon and we still had a ways to go. Our ferry to Orcas Island was scheduled to leave Anacortes at 3:40. And the ferry website advised us to arrive at the toll gate at least 45 minutes to an hour before departure. So we gave ourselves a 2:40 deadline. That left us just time enough to charge up the car one more time . Why? Well, we had enough charge remaining to easily get us to our destination. But our destination had no fast chargers, so it was a matter not just of getting there, but also of driving around the island to see the sights and then getting back from the island to the nearest charging station. So we stopped again at a Tesla station just twenty miles from Anacortes. We had enough time to charge up and then get to the ferry terminal by 2:45. Whew. Finally we could relax. (E remembers that we didn’t even take the time to pop in to the See’s chocolate shop which was right next to the charging area.)

As the ferry eased out of the dock, E watched the cormorants.

A few minutes later, M looked back at Anacortes, where another ferry was still docked at the terminal.

An hour and a half later, after a brief stop at Shaw Island, our ferry docked at the Orcas Island terminal. Once disembarked, we drove north to the town of Eastsound. By the time we got there, we were getting hungry again and decided to stop for dinner before going on to check in to our room. After wandering around a bit, we stepped into the White Horse Pub, where we got seats at a window overlooking a body of water called Fishing Bay.

After dinner we pushed on a few more miles to our hotel room. As we entered the room, we again noted the time: 7:36 PM. So yeah, it was a long day of travel. We’re tempted to call it 12 hours door to door, but that would be an exaggeration.

Tuesday, September 9th

We woke up this morning in our room at the Rosario Resort. Rosario is the site of a very grand mansion built in 1906 by a fellow named Robert Moran. Moran was born in New York City in 1857. At the age of 18 he left New York–in part to escape an ill-tempered father–and arrived in Seattle with just ten cents to his name. Through several years of hard work he made enough money to bring his mother and four younger siblings out to Seattle to join him. He then proceeded to get very rich by building up a marine services and construction business in which he employed all three of his younger brothers. He was twice elected mayor of Seattle. Then, in his late forties, he was told by doctors that he had less than a year to live. He then retired, sold his business and moved to a mansion on Orcas Island. Retirement was good for him; he went on to live another 40 years to the age of 86. (This summary barely scratches the surface of Moran’s life; see more here.)

Today Rosario Resort includes the mansion plus three separate houses that Moran built for his brothers. You can’t see the sibling houses in the photo above, but you can see two more pieces of the current property: the round, clifftop playhouse that Moran built for the kids and the rather tacky square building that a more recent owner built to so as to have more rooms to rent out. The mansion, as originally built, contained something like 27 bedrooms, but that building is closed these days. The playhouse has been converted to a luxury room; it’s now rentable but quite expensive. We stayed in the square building. Our room was spacious and reasonably comfortable. But boy did it need a new carpet. As a “resort and spa” Rosario has seen better days.

We had breakfast in the room–there being no other option. We ate fruit and granola bars and made coffee on the in-room machine. There were plenty of coffee packets for said machine, seven in total, all decaf. E pulled out a tube of caffeinated Nescafe from among her standard travel supplies, so we managed to create half-caff, which is more or less what we’re drinking these days. After breakfast we went back to town and bought supplies at Orcas Island Market–the largest grocery on the island and one that we found to be a wonderful place.

Later in the morning we went walking on the Cascade Lake waterfalls trail in nearby Moran State Park. The area has never been logged and is quite beautiful.

We next drove around a bit, stopping to eat our picnic lunch in a townlet called Olga and also driving past the Buck Bay Shellfish Farm. We’re told that you can get a wonderful meal there, but all we took away was a photo.

Soon we went back to Rosario for a rest. We found some Adirondack chairs on the lawn outside our window and spent a couple of hours reading our books. We were looking out over a lovely little bay below tree covered slopes. It was a wonderfully peaceful scene, seemingly far away from anywhere.

During this season, at least, most restaurants on Orcas are closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, so finding a place to have dinner was a challenge. Fortunately, we found a Mexican restaurant called Mijita’s. They were doing a brisk business on this Tuesday and their food was excellent. Mijita’s is near the Eastsound Public Library and after dinner we walked over that way. The library garden was awesome. E saw some things she wanted for her garden.

Wednesday, September 10th

Today we wanted to take a longer walk, so we decided to try hiking around a mountain lake. The trail was said to be 3.9 miles, which is a little much for some of us these days, but we figured it would be mostly level. The name of this mountain lake is easy to remember. It’s called Mountain Lake. Here’s what the whole area looks like to space aliens visiting from above. It’s a lot prettier from the ground. Moran owned most of this land. He never allowed logging or hunting and donated hundreds of acres to make the park.

After the hike, we drove a little farther up the mountain to see the view.

Thursday, September 11th

Time to go home. We got on the 9:10 AM ferry, which got us back to the mainland at around 10:45. The passenger decks on these ferries are really quite comfortable, with long rows of padded seats in the middle and a couple dozen spacious tables along the sides. We found a table with a completed jigsaw puzzle on it. We took it apart and had it back together again by the time we pulled into Anacortes.

The drive back to Corvallis again made for a long day, but not having a ferry deadline at the end made it less stressful than the drive up.

Friday, September 12th

E went grocery shopping today at the Co-op. When she came out, she found that her blue car had attracted four others.

Saturday, September 13th

E attended a backyard concert hosted by one of our neighbors. It involved a potluck dinner and a recital by a local singer/songwriter. It was a lovely clear night and E enjoyed the music and the camaraderie.

Monday, August 25th

We set off on a camping trip to the coast today, spending the morning packing up and then leaving Corvallis right after lunch. It was a sunny 91 degrees in the Valley and the coast promised to be different. And indeed it was. When we stopped at a pull-out on the coast highway near Heceta Head, the world seemed dark and damp.

Our campsite was just a few miles south of Heceta. It was also half a mile inland, far enough to be out of the mist and into the sun. It was still damp, though, and not particularly warm.

We had a new piece of gear to try out, the mosquito net tent extension that we got from China via Quebec. There were no assembly instructions, but M had watched a video and brought along some extra bungee cords. So we managed to get it up. This is not quite how it’s supposed to look, but it’s close.

Tuesday, August 26th

After shivering through a breakfast of granola bars and toast, we drove back north a few miles along the coast and hiked up the Cummins Creek Trail. It’s a lovely walk through mature forest of hemlock, fir and red cedar. If you look carefully, you can see that the trail mostly follows a long abandoned road. We didn’t do the whole upper loop as that would have made for a total of seven miles, too much for us these days. We just walked up a mile or two, lunched on tuna sandwiches and then started back.

At that point we needed a little civilization, so we went to the Green Tortoise coffee place in Yachats, arriving just before closing time. After that it was back to the campsite, where we re-attached our truck tent and started to think about dinner. By dinnertime, we were getting a brisk on-shore breeze, damp and coldish. We bundled ourselves up in all our layers and ate some hot chili. We then went to bed early to keep warm but later found ourselves wide awake at midnight. To cure our insomnia we went for a midnight walk through the dim and quiet campground. To our surprise the wind had stopped and the temperature was much warmer than in the daytime, so it was a very pleasant time to walk.

Wednesday, August 27th

This morning we broke camp and started the trip home. On the way, we stopped at the Cape Perpetua visitors center. There are lots of interesting displays there, including a few bits and pieces about the people who originally lived in the area. Next to a display of native style baskets, there was a description of what happened when a basket maker agreed to give a class on how to make baskets. Here’s a description of the first few weeks of the class:

We also walked a one mile trail from the Visitor’s Center to the site of a very large Sitka Spruce. This one is estimated to be about 500 years old. Sitka Spruces only grow within 50 miles of the ocean, but that narrow strip of habitat extends from southeastern Alaska all the way down to Northern California.

The wood from a Sitka spruce is strong but lightweight, which made it very useful for building early airplanes. The Wright Brothers’ Flyer was built from spruce, as were the majority of airplanes prior to World War Two. (The Spruce Goose, however, was actually made of birch.) Spruce wood is also an excellent conductor of sound and is widely used to make musical instruments such as pianos, harps, guitars, and violins.

Wednesday, September 3rd

Today we drove up north a ways, stopping at the Woodburn Outlet Mall. In the Panera restaurant parking lot, we met up with a fellow named Roman, who owns a 550 HP Jaguar F-Type R and was looking for a nice car cover for it. For a nominal fee, the Chambeck Buyer Assistance Service was able to supply one.

We then had lunch at Panera. This Panera was kind of different. It had only self service kiosk style ordering, which meant that when we came in we didn’t see any humans anywhere. When we looked around the corner into the dining area, we could that there were a few customers; but considering that it was lunchtime, it didn’t seem like there were very many. There were employees present; you could hear them chatting somewhere in the back. And whenever one of the few diners finished and started to leave, a human would appear immediately and whisk away the dishes. It was a little eerie.

Just by coincidence (!) there happened to be a See’s Candy shop on the other side of the Panera parking lot. Inside that place, we had considerably more human interaction than we’d had at Panera. After that, we set off for our main destination: The Erratic Rock State Natural Site. The rock that this site honors currently sits atop a hill in the middle of an agricultural area just west of McMinneville, Oregon; but scientists say that it is originally from Canada, at least 500 miles away. It is estimated to weigh about 80,000 pounds.

At some point during the last ice age, this large piece of rock was captured by a glacier and spent a few thousand years encased in ice. But then, as the last ice age started winding down, a whole lot of the ice age ice started to melt. The meltwater had nowhere to go because some remaining ice had created a dam thousands of feet high. At that point the ice surrounding the rock stopped being part of a glacier and instead became a large iceberg floating around in a very, very big lake of really cold water. But not quite cold enough. Eventually the ice dam broke and 50 cubic miles of water and ice rushed south. The resultant flow was up to 1,000 feet deep, more than powerful enough to carry along a small army of icebergs, including one that contained a certain big piece of rock. The flood flowed south for a hundred miles or so and then turned right* to head west down the Columbia Gorge. Then, at the mouth of the Willamette, it turned left* and flowed south again for 150 miles or so. Our rock, however, didn’t make it quite that far. Just forty miles south of what is now Portland, the iceberg with the big rock in it ran aground on a hill. And now the only trace of that iceberg is the rock it left behind.

*How, you might ask, did the flood know where to turn right and then later where to turn left? That’s a profound question and hard to answer, especially since they didn’t have any GPS at all back then. But if you asked the flood, it would probably say: I just go with the flow.

Thursday, September 4th

Another meeting of the Lemon Meringue Pie Society took place today. This was a traditional gathering in that it featured an actual lemon meringue pie, this one having been produced in-house by Chambeck Enterprises. All six members attended and each brought a healthy and delicious contribution to a potluck dinner preceding the pie.