Travel notes: Summer road trip to Seattle, observations from my time on the highway

Reporter's note: Regular readers of the "Journal" know I make periodic road trips to the Seattle area to visit our daughter and eight grandkids. Many of those trips are via Amtrak, especially in the winter, and the rest are by car when bad roads are less likely to cause a travel problem. The last week of June I made a trip to the Seattle area, without my wife, to babysit our four youngest grandsons-age three to nine. Our daughter needed a little help as she was doing orientation for a part time job as a nutritionist-her first venture back to the workforce since her first child was born 20 years ago.

I decided to share a bit of my road trip adventure. Here are some observations from my time on the highways and keeping my young charges busy and out of mischief in the Evergreen State. I relearned why seventy year olds don't have babies. It was a great week.

On the road

Couple of interesting things were noted during the trip over to Seattle. In the Idaho panhandle, at a rest stop on I-90, I saw a truck with 12 axles and what appeared to be a very wide, heavy and mysteriously wrapped load. It was a Canada-based trucker but no one was around with the truck. Later I called the trucking company and learned the load was headed to an oil refinery in Ferndale, Washington and coming from Calgary, Alberta. The load was a 'compressor station,' one of five such pieces that were being installed as a part of the refinery upgrade. Each compressor station weighed 76 tons. And the protective packaging was described as similar to the covering used to protect expensive yachts and boats for transportation. Just trying to estimate the cost of tires for the truck gave me a headache.

In the mountains in Idaho, Washington and western Montana, the sea foam was in bloom. I was familiar with this mountain bush from when we lived in Libby, but had not seen it in bloom for some time. If readers are not familiar with sea foam, when in its prime the cream colored flowers, spread across a mountain side, give the appearance of looking at the sea-hence the name sea foam. It's very beautiful but only lasts for a short time

In Washington state

It's a total of 800 miles from Chinook to Lynnwood, Washington, where our daughter and her family live. If I stick to driving, don't dawdle at too many stops and the traffic cooperates, I can make the trip in about 14 hours. I left on a Saturday morning and, with no commuter traffic at the end of the trip in Seattle because of the weekend, the trip went smoothly.

On the Sunday after I arrived, my daughter took me and three of the little boys to a local county park. The park was well known to me from prior trips and time spent with the older grandchildren years ago. What I noticed was the little guys had no interest in the playground, the hiking trails or the swim pool. Once they spied a little creek running through the park, that's as far as they got. As long as they could throw rocks in the water, make dams with mud and generally get wet and dirty, they were happy. That was my clue for the best way to entertain them the rest of the week-water and rocks. Thankfully, western Washington has plenty of both and we kept ourselves entertained either at rivers or at beaches along Puget Sound for the entire week.

One day we made a trip to Arlington, a little town north of Seattle, where my wife and I lived for a time. Our first stop was a rock throwing session along the north fork of the Stillaguamish River. Then we drove north to see the aftermath of the Oso mudslide, a massive mountain collapse that killed 43 people in March of 2014. As I'd heard, the area was somewhat cleaned up and a new highway completed through the valley area that was covered in some places by 20 feet of mud and debris from the slide. There were stern warnings about "no parking or stopping along the highway" but a little pullout allowed for a place to view the scene. Visitors had turned the gated area at the slide zone into a memorial-with notes, flowers and memorabilia commemorating a very tragic event.

When we went to county parks, most of which were in the suburbs, we encountered another phenomenon I had forgotten-the arrival of day camp season. Many kids, now out of school, are sent to day camps while the parents work. The day camps, to give the kids some outside time, bus them by the hundreds to public parks. When two or three busloads of day campers arrive at a park, it was usually time to move on with the little boys I was watching.

One last observation really got my attention. For years, despite the best efforts of Seattle-area law officers, many on and off ramps to the freeway system are manned by panhandlers. They usually are at a strategic location where a stop sign or traffic light will halt traffic long enough for a possible handout. The panhandler's situation is often briefly stated on a handmade cardboard sign they are holding-describing they are living in a tent, need a job, have no prospects or future, etc. The locations and signs were still the same.

The big change was that every panhandler at a freeway ramp on this trip I saw was a female. This was a major sea change from just a couple of years ago when the panhandlers were all male. I asked some locals about the change. Had the laws changed giving an advantage to women? Were women more successful at separating drivers from their money? No one had an explanation. I wonder if I could get a federal grant to study the question...I should check into that?

So, it was a fun trip. The weather was near perfect for a Northwest summer week-cool nights, dry days, moderate temperatures and lots of sunshine. To give readers an idea of how warm the weather was, the locals were about to swoon in the heat, which sometimes would get all the way up to the low 80's. The grandkids, for the most part, were cooperative. And, I'll have to say even I had a great time skipping rocks, getting wet and making dams in the mud. I guess that's really what grandkids are all about, having fun with the next generation