After long hesitation, we decide not to follow our planned route into the Rocky Mountains of Canada. For those of you who follow our itinerary closely, you will have noticed that we have done a lot of driving. GPS Sally tells us that we have accumulated 4,000 miles already. Francis has been pressed to drive out West as soon as possible “because that’s where all the good stuff is” and “we risk to get snowed in”, whereas Edmée would not have minded to linger around longer in the Plains to fully savor the American experience and find places where the clock is turned 50 years back. But we find that there is so much to see that we have to make choices. The only way do it well is to become “full timers” and we are not quite there yet. So we take Canada off the itinerary and decide to go skiing in Whistler at the first opportunity when we are “settled” and visit Glacier National Park during a spring, when the setting should be at it’s most dramatic.
We continue to the West to our next destination: Mount Rainier National Park. Rising more than 2 miles above the surrounding landscape at 14,411 foot, Mount Rainier is an active volcano. We drive into the Park though a long canyon and enter the park at the Ohananpecosh entrance (yes, we practiced that a few times…it is Indian for “standing at the edge”). It is already late afternoon and we admire stunning fall color mixed with the intense green of the pine forests. We pass very large riverbeds with friendly turquoise streams embedded in them and just wonder how wild those rivers must be in the spring, when the average 640 inches of winter snow start to melt. The road steeply winds up the sub alpine meadows and soon we are rewarded with a stunning view of the mountain in the late sunlight. We breathe the fresh smell of the pine trees and take some pictures. We have not solved the problem of where we can sleep during the night yet. Because it is late in the season, all the campgrounds we have passed are closed. We decide to park near “reflection lake” to enable Edmée to take some pictures in the morning. We park and soon get enclosed by thick fog, which protects us from the preying eyes of the park rangers (officially no camping outside of the campgrounds). The bad news is that the thick fog is still there in the morning, so no reflections of anything. The good news is that we can sleep in a little. Mount Rainier holds up to its reputation of creating its own weather system and although the forecast for Washington state could not be better for the time of year, it slowly starts to rain a lazy rain, the type that could be there all day. So no quick running to the summit for Francis and no wildflower pictures for Edmée.
We drive towards Seattle and are surprised by the beauty of the Puget Sound and the friendliness of the people. Edmée’s friends Janneke and Rik and their 3 kids warmly welcome us in their beautiful house in Medina, close to Seattle. They recently moved to the area from the Netherlands and they seemed to have everything well sorted. They are very impressed by the attentiveness and the positive outlook of the people in their neighborhood and their commitment to a good life/work balance. We discuss over a nice glass of wine and they take away many of Edmée’s hesitations of moving to the States. We decide to add Seattle to our shortlist.
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We visit Moab, still vivid in Edmee's memory as the place where she once nearly collapsed of exhaustion on the Slick Rock mountain bike trail with Francis a few years ago. Luckily the excuse comes in the form of Tyler, who is still a little too young to attack Slick Rock.
