We spent this June more on the road than otherwise. C drove down from Seattle over Memorial Day weekend, and after I spent a workweek packing for an extended stay on Puget Sound, we road-tripped north. We only had a three-day weekend, but we strung together some sightseeing stops along the way.
We had an overnight stay in Yosemite National Park, where I finally saw the Yosemite Valley — and not one but two new-to-my-camera lupine species, and a very cooperative nuthatch, the headline image for this post.
From Yosemite we drove north, and detoured for Crater Lake, which I’ve never seen at all. There were still multiple feet of snow at the summit visitor center; we crunched over it for photos, perused the gift shop, bought a couple coffees, and drove on.
The weekend after arriving in Seattle, we flew cross-country to Boston. C had wedding invitation from an old college friend — a lovely ceremony on a farm-turned-event-venue in rural New Hampshire. From there we drove our rental car toward Bar Harbor, where we’d booked a bed and breakfast for most of the week. We detoured en route to take the cog railway up Mount Washington, a precipitous trip up to a summit where the winds were so strong we could barely stand upright for a photo at the top.
Arriving in Bar Harbor that night, we parked at the bed and breakfast and didn’t get into the car again until we left three days later. We could walk from town right into Acadia National Park, and over our time there we hiked from the B&B to the summit of Cadillac Mountain and back, took a boat tour past lighthouses to a seabird rookery full of Atlantic puffins, and rented electric bikes to ride almost the entire length of the wide graveled carriage roads that wind through the National Park.
From Bar Harbor, we drove back to Boston, dropped the rental car, and took the train to New York. Over two nights there, we caught a couple of shows — Cabaret on the Friday, a transcendently silly adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance on Saturday — and then flew back to Seattle. I had three working days in town before flying back east for the Evolution meetings, and got back from that jaunt just in time for Seattle Pride, on the final weekend of the month.
It was a good month of travel; it’s good to finally be home.