Category Archives: Pacific Northwest

Leavenworth – How Did I Not Foresee This?

After our trip to Roslyn, we decided to cut north towards Leavenworth. I had heard about this town before although I hadn’t researched it at all. It is famous for being in the style of a Bavarian town. All of the buildings are styled like a Bavarian building and the town takes the theme everywhere. Starbucks and McDonalds have their signs in a similar style!

While we were there, on a sunny summer’s day, the streets were busy and entertainment was being provided. Some dancers had just finished up when we arrived but a band was playing on the bandstand with the sort of oompah music you might have expected. They were pretty good too.

What I had not thought through is what sort of town this would be. I grew up in tourist areas and have lived in others since. I should have realized what the town would include. Every building does look German but inside they are either an eatery or they are selling the amazing quantities of crap that you only find in tourist traps. It was shop after shop full of rubbish. We very quickly realized that there wasn’t too much to see but there were large crowds of people to get through to not see anything. Time for a swift exit. There was the museum of nutcrackers but, since I find them a creepy looking item at the best of times, that was not going to be the place for me!

Flamingos Fighting and Sleeping

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Wildlife is an attractive subject for photography, particularly when the creature in question is colorful. A flamingo certainly fits the bill with the vibrant pink coloring. In addition, given that they have such long necks and shapely heads, they can curl themselves up in ways that make for an interesting image. The Woodland Park Zoo had a bunch of flamingos (a prize for the person that tells me the collective noun for flamingos without having to Google it).

Most of the birds were just hanging around, wandering about the enclosure and eating/drinking. A few of them were asleep and a couple seemed to be pretty aggravated with each other. These guys were chasing around the place and generally getting worked up which seemed to be nothing more than an inconvenience to the other birds. The ones trying to sleep seemed particularly unimpressed by the disturbance.

The way in which a flamingo will sleep makes for a cool shot. Aside from the single leg pose (apparently easy even while unconscious), they curl their necks around and rest their heads on the back of their bodies, apparently facing backwards. The curve of the neck and the way in which the head sits in their back feathers is a great shape and zooming right in to get a tight shot of this seemed to make a lot of sense. (Besides, when you are carrying a long lens all day, shooting with it must be the right thing to do huh?)

Easy to Guess Who You Work For

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At was at BFI awaiting the arrival of something and I was checking FlightRadar24 to see what was coming in. I saw a Learjet 60 on the screen south of SeaTac and tapped on it. As soon as I saw the flight path, it was clear who the jet belonged to. The shot below was what I saw and the repeated patterns around SeaTac suggested it was an FAA aircraft undertaking calibration flights for the airport instrumentation.

I stopped thinking about it for a while until I saw a jet appear on the approach to BFI that I hadn’t been aware of. Sure enough, it was the FAA Lear 60. They plonked it down right on the keys and quickly exited to the FBO. I imagine that flying repeated sequences of approaches is not the most exciting way to spend the day so they were glad of the break.

Hiram M Chittenden Locks

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Just north of the center of Seattle is Ballard. Aside from being an interesting area with shops, bars and restaurants, it is also home to a set of locks that connect the salt waters of Puget Sound with Lake Union and Lake Washington’s fresh waters. The locks are the busiest in the US with a steady stream of traffic. On the weekend, this is heavily dominated by pleasure craft but commercial vessels are also a big feature. Indeed, while we were there, we found out that there is a hierarchy of which types of vessel get to go through first, even if some of the owners of the small pleasure craft were not up to speed on the rules!

The locks are named after the man who was instrumental in the early phases of their construction. Aside from leading a big construction project, he also was quite visionary in other areas but that will be the topic of another post soon. There are actually two locks. One is a small lock that suits pleasure craft or small commercial vessels. The other is far broader and longer and can be operated with a middle set of gates if less vessels are coming through. It can also take a lot of smaller boats wedged together like a giant game of Tetris when demand is high such as is the case on warm holiday weekends.

The locks are open to the public along with a small botanic garden. You can cross over the top of the gates (although these are rather narrow and can get congested when people decide to stop and hang around rather than keep moving). There is plenty of space along the sides of the locks to watch the boats as they come in and as they rapidly rise or fall when the water levels are adjusted. We obviously weren’t the only ones to find it a relaxing spot to hang out for a while.

The Red Pandas are Performers

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Visiting the zoo is often a game of hide and seek with the animals. They live according to their normal schedules and are not inclined to be active just because you happen to be there. They also will find a favored location in their enclosure which is not putting them on display to the animals on the other side of the glass. You may catch a glimpse of something sleeping in a shadowy space or you may wonder whether the animal is even in there.

When we got to the red panda enclosure, I was half expecting to not see very much. I figured this would be another reclusive creature. I was wrong. I don’t know whether they are naturally energetic creatures, whether they are curious about their visitors or whether some unseen motivation is given to them to get out there but these guys were the exact opposite of what I had anticipated. They had a number of trees within their space and they were very happy to zip around through the branches. This often brought them right up front to where the visitors were standing. They would happily motor about, stare at the people, head back, disappear for a while before reappearing and repeating the process. Their public was suitably appreciative.

A Surprise Appearance of This Two-Seater

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Paine Field is the home of Paul Allen’s collection which includes a MiG29UB. I had seen it being dragged around the airport once but had never seen it fly. I was there to catch the Catfish, as described in this post, when a loud engine noise came from the right. I hadn’t been paying attention but, when the MiG taxied towards us, I certainly did. It came right by where I was and then held at the end of the runway before lining up and departing – sadly in dry power only. It was a bit far away and the heat haze was bad but who wouldn’t take a shot anyway?

Roslyn/Cicely Alaska

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If you are not too young, you may have watched a TV show in the 90s called Northern Exposure. Set in the fictional town of Cicely Alaska, it revolved around a young doctor from New York who had been sponsored through school and, in order to fulfill his sponsorship obligations, had to go and work in this remote town. It was a quirky show and I liked it. It wasn’t filmed in Alaska though. The exterior work was mainly done in a town called Roslyn that sits just on the other side of the Cascades from Seattle. We decided to take a trip.

Roslyn was a mining town for many years. However, when the coal became too uneconomic to mine, things got very quiet. There is a little museum in the center of the town which includes a display outside of some of the mining equipment. There is also a memorial to the miners including a lengthy list of those that lost their lives in the mines.

There are a few buildings that you might recognize from the TV show. The opening sequence of the show includes a moose wandering around the town and passing a café called Roslyn’s Café. The apostrophe and s were added for that sequence but the Roslyn Café is still there and we had a good lunch inside. The doctor’s office is now a gift shop in which you can get plenty of Northern Exposure related goodies. The tavern that was central to the show, The Brick, is also there although clearly the interior shots were done on a stage since it looks very different.

The drive to Roslyn takes you across the Cascades via Snoqualmie Pass and it is a pretty drive on its own but Roslyn was a fun place to visit. It is a small town with a few interesting shops and no shortage of places to eat and drink. We also wandered out of the center a bit, up the hill to see the local church. Then we headed on our way.

787 Development Jets

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Two versions of the Boeing 787 have been in service for a while. However, development activities continue. The 787-10 is still undergoing flight test but work also continues on the older jets. Some of this is also related to the Dash 10. I had a post on my first encounter with the 787-10 which I wrote about here. I have since come across another of the test aircraft. This one is plain white and doesn’t benefit from the nice house colors that Boeing has.

Meanwhile, one of the 787-8 test aircraft has recently been testing the newest version of the Rolls Royce Trent 1000. I saw this engine when it was being tested on Rolls’ testbed in Tucson and that was in this post. Now it has been fitted to its intended platform and is undergoing trials. These have included lengthy flights around the US including one in which they traced out the planform of the aircraft across multiple states. If you are going to go flying for 18 hours, you might as well find a way to have fun with it. The aircraft is carrying the same logo on the engine nacelle that was on the testbed. Hopefully, the delayed upgraded engine will soon be in service, not just on the Dash 10 but also on the other variants.

Macaws of Different Colors

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The Macaw is a bird that really looks like it has been created for our amusement. The bright colors and personality of the birds combined with their intelligence makes them instantly attractive. We can forget for a while that they are the way they are because they are adapted for the environment in which they live (by which I don’t mean a zoo).

We saw a few of them at Cougar Mountain Zoo. Some of them were out on perches in the zoo grounds. A few were brought up to a stage to demonstrate their intelligence and dexterity. They really are a quite amazing bird. While it is easy to be impressed by their capabilities, you don’t ever forget how amazing they look. The vivid colors and the fascinating shape make it easy to just spend time watching them. What a fantastic creature.

Waterfall Park

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I was with a couple of colleagues in downtown Seattle between meetings. We were walking along the street just killing some time when we came upon Waterfall Park. Tucked on the corner of a block in amongst the buildings, it is a little area with a waterfall (what a shock I hear you cry) running down an artificial rock face into a pool. It seems set up to provide a restful spot for workers to enjoy in the middle of the day. Indeed, it closes by mid-afternoon. There was a security guy on duty so maybe someone has tried to mess with it in the past which is rather disappointing. I only had my phone with me but hopefully you can get a feel for the spot.