Midwest2Westcoast

  We had the good fortune of getting together with Max Marble this week. Ann and I may pretend we’re traveling light and untethered, but Max is the OG when it comes to a Missouri Conference staff person leaving the desk to go into the wild. Max has been traveling the country in a van named Henry. Max pretends Henry is an RV, so he can hang with the NOMADS, an OMC (Outlaw Methodist Club) that requires RV ownership to join their gang. They respect Max for his street cred, so they turn a blind eye to the fact that Henry is not an RV. If you were to examine Henry’s DNA, you would find him to be much closer kin to the chartreuse microbuses the long-haired friends of Jesus used to travel the country back in the 1970s. Max bounces around all over the country, but one of his favorite places is house sitting for friends in Port Townsend, WA, about an hour and a half from our humble abode in Tacoma. This is also my good fortune. Max would occasionally pass through Columbia, but he had s...

I’m not one to pick favorites, but if I were pushed to name my heroes in writing, I suppose I’d list Mark Twain, Will Rogers and Kurt Vonnegut. If you pushed me harder and asked me to name someone still alive, Joel Stein would make the short list. Stein wrote for Time magazine for 20 years, and he mentions in his bio that he wrote 22 cover stories. Wait, isn’t Time a weekly magazine? I have to say, 22 cover stories in a 22-year run doesn’t sound like all that many, but it’s still 22 more cover stories than I ever wrote for Time magazine. If you’re on the older end of Gen X or older, you know that Time and Newsweek were what kept readers informed about national issues for decades. For non-readers, there was 60 Minutes and 20/20. Time had a circulation of more than 4 million in its heyday. I didn’t realize it still existed, but apparently they still crank out about a million of them. But Stein hasn’t written for Time in about 10 years. He has written two books: Man Made: A Stupid Q...

Last Saturday, our friends (both of them) invited us to go with them to a Sounders match. To those of you who don’t know, which would have included me before I Googled it, the Sounders are the professional soccer team in Seattle. We had told our friends earlier that our calendar is rather open and we wouldn’t be turning down many invitations. They’ve come through for us with multiple fun outings. This one would be breaking new ground, as it is both out of town and a professional sporting event. The sum total of my experience with soccer is watching part of a game on television about 15 years ago at my neighbor’s house. All that I really remember is that there wasn’t much scoring. I checked in with a former co-worker who is knowledgeable of all things sports. He shared that soccer is all about ball flow and creativity, with the buildup to the goal being the highlight. He said to expect a maximum of five goals. We (meaning Seattle) were going to be playing St. Louis, whose team (e...

We hit up a new trail Sunday, in a part of the state we hadn’t been to since arriving last fall. On the Missouri-side of Seattle (versus the ocean side), there is Lake Washington, then a short drive to small mountains. Some of these mountains are particularly pointy. I hope you didn’t come to this blog expecting to learn a lot of technical geological terms. We made our way up a slow I-5 (on a Sunday morning no less! Why weren’t all these people in church?) to Highway 90, across the big floating bridge that recently became the only floating bridge in the world to accommodate a light rail train, and then on to the woods. The countryside on the way was gorgeous. Our destination was Wallace Falls State Park. The parking lot was full, but you could park alongside the road just outside the entrance to the park, about half a mile from the trailhead. We hiked up the trail about 2 ½ miles, which was plenty for Mary. It was steep in parts, and I even picked her up and lifted her to the ne...

  Ann had a birthday recently. As we recall, the only other birthday of her life that wasn’t spent with her parents was 2020 during COVID. It was certainly the only birthday in Oliver’s life that he wasn’t with her, and the second one for Henry. We still managed. We had dinner at Woven, a waterfront restaurant we hadn't been to yet. It's owned by the Puyallup Tribe and focuses on food from the Pacific Islands. It was very good. For a birthday cake, since it was just the two of us, I picked up a small cake from Metropolitan Market, the fancy grocery store in Tacoma.  The most awkward part was when I brought out her cake and started singing Happy Birthday solo. I’m not a singer, and it didn’t sound all that festive. We quickly moved on to eating the cake. Later in the week, we went to an Earth Day event. It was similar to Earth Day events back in Missouri, as it was a lot of government agencies and non-profits who care about the environment, presenting brochures and information...

  Some of you are wondering what Mary was up to during our recent trip to Missouri. You may recall, for the Thanksgiving trip, Mary spent nearly two weeks with my cousin Susan in Portland. Although Mary had a fantastic time bonding with Susan and her family, which included other dogs, Portland is nearly a three-hour drive away in good traffic. In bad traffic, it can take years. Closer accommodations were needed. I hate asking for favors because people are too nice and will say yes to help out even if it’s a big inconvenience. I’d rather just put my need out there and hope someone volunteers. I did that very thing on the Salmon Beach Facebook page, in the guise of asking for recommendations for pet sitting. Word got around to my next-door neighbor, John, who offered to take Mary when he saw me on the stairs just after my post. This was the best-case scenario. John has a beautiful dog named Zach, who is also some kind of poodle cross, and maybe a small variety of Burmese Mountain Dog...

  There are more Missourians who are Washington-bound. These will be our first Missouri visitors who aren’t linked to Ann by DNA. Full disclosure, these are also people who would be coming if we weren’t here, but we’re still excited about seeing them while they are in the area. My friend Joe is coming for an Otillo on May 31. Otillo isn't just a trending buzzword that I dropped into my blog to optimize its search engine results. It’s an event in which swim, run, swim, run, swim, run… you get the idea. Unlike a triathlon, where you have a transition zone, on this event you are running in what you swim in, and taking your shoes with you while you swim. Three total distance options ranging from 10k to 40k. It’s on Orcas Island. When Joe first told me about it, I assumed he would be swimming around between islands, but I think the course is all actually inland on Ocras Island. We plan to meet up with Joe post-race for dinner. My friends Brad and Kim are coming for the Olympic Mountains...

  We made our second trip back to Missouri, to uphold the 25-year tradition of hosting Ann’s family for Easter and Thanksgiving. Airplane tickets were a deal. $175 roundtrip, direct flight Seattle to St. Louis, on Alaska Air. It takes a bit less than four hours to go there, and a shade over four to come back, at least on the days we were flying. I rented a car from Avis. It was a Toyota Camry. I’ve got to hand it to Toyota – this Camry rode as good as any big sedan, felt like a sports car driving it, and got nearly 50 mpg the whole time I had it. I thought maybe the onboard computer was fibbing, but I happened to be out of gas right before I left Columbia, so I filled it up there. Then I filled it again as I was taking it back to the rental car place in St. Louis, and I could only get a few drops over 2 gallons in it. Gas is practically free in Missouri anyway. At $3.50 per gallon, I considered taking the Camry back to Avis and demanding a car that got worse gas mileage. It was too...

  We attended a Pierce County volunteer recognition event today. Ann had nominated this dude Weston, who apparently is a cracker-jack tree planter, for an award. He received an honorable mention as a youth volunteer. Upon having a brunch with Weston and a couple of his family members, we learned that he has a birthday coming up on Monday – the same day as Ann’s. We marveled at this coincidence. Pierce County has a population of nearly a million people. It takes a good two hours to drive all the way across the county, and that’s if you don’t throw the islands and ferries into the mix. The county has a few thousand employees. It’s kind of a big deal. And apparently, a ton of volunteers help keep the wheels turning. In Washington, they call the guy running the show at the county the County Executive, whereas in Missouri, we would call this position the Presiding Commissioner. In Pierce County that person is Ryan Mello. From what I’ve heard, Mello is doing a great job as County Executi...

The city of Tacoma, Pierce County or perhaps the state of Washington should give us a grant. I guess that’s unlikely, because usually you apply for a grant to get money to do a thing, then you do that thing. In this case, we’ve already done the thing, so I don’t think any entity is going to mail us a check. Within our first year of living in Tacoma, we’ve brought in 12 out-of-state visitors. I’m sure there have been tourism department-sponsored campaigns that couldn’t legitimately match our numbers, as I can personally testify that none of these people would have traveled here were it not for us. Two of the 12 were even repeat visits, which demonstrates that we showed them a good time on round one. The total average stay was right around a week. It’s also true that all of them were blood relatives of Ann, but I don’t have to mention that part in the grant application. You’ve already met the parents and the boys. Our two March trips included Ann’s sister one week, and a pack of h...