To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Returned from adventures in the Pacific Northwest! I have 680 photos on my camera card, lots of souvenirs, and my knees are still protesting at five days of wandering around a city, hiking up a mountain, and traipsing around in assorted woods and on assorted beaches, so I think it was a vacation well-spent. A full report will have to wait until I get my photos loaded onto my computer (and also for Ellen to send me the pictures she took of me in front of a windmill, getting attacked by a Dalek, and enacting a Star Trek redshirt's death, because I feel no photoblog of this trip would be complete without those), but for now, highlights:

- Traveling with rowdycamels! Getting to meet and hang out with rivendellrose!

- We won the weather lottery. It was sunny or partly cloudy for the entire time we were there, minus some car travel time and about half of the downward part of a mountain hike (though at that point, we were so glad it waited to start hailing/raining until we were out of the snowy part of said mountain that we didn't much care). I actually got a bit of a sunburn on my nose.

- Seattle and the surrounding areas have amazing food. That was the best I've ever eaten on vacation--or possibly at all--in my life. Every meal was incredible, whether it was seafood, Thai, vaguely-Mexican vegan, crumpets/pastry/fruit from the Pike Place Market, whatever. We got ourselves a cooler and did most lunches as picnics, and even those were great, although possibly some of that was because we were so hungry from hiking or long drives that many things would've tasted good.

- I got to walk through Cicely! It was awesome! And yes, I did indeed buy the t-shirt.

- I drove the entire length of Seattle in rush hour traffic and survived! I also drove in and around Pioneer Square and survived!

- Tuuuuuuuuulips. So many tulips.

- Evergreen trees everywhere.

- We did not die by falling off the side of a mountain. Although I think we came close more times than I would like to think about. There's one section of the trail up to Lake Twenty-Two that has already featured in my nightmares, and probably will continue to do so for some time. I don't think I took a picture, but imagine a very steep drop on one side, a tall, crumbly snowbank lining the other side all the way up the rest of the mountain, and a slippery, ice-crusted, nine-inch-wide "path" between the two. We should've turned back, but as was our constant refrain, "We've come this far!"

- Speaking of Lake Twenty-Two, there will definitely be pictures, but for now, the experience in a nutshell: "This isn't a trail, it's a creek/rock field/eight-foot-high snowbank!"

- While Deception Pass bridge and state park were very nice, Google found us an even better city park in Anacortes on a spit of land sticking out into the sea, where we watched the sun set over the San Juan Islands. (Admittedly, it was a very windy, very cold spit of land. Still.) Also, we got to wander among some very friendly deer.

More to come later. I don't know that I ever quite adjusted to Pacific time, largely because Seattle is so far north that it was still daylight until about 8:30, which was so bizarre for late April that I just gave up on ever figuring out what time it should be. But while I'm not sure it feels like midnight now, after the past several days, it definitely feels like BEDTIME.