Friday - We ended up at a campground about 20 miles south of Olympia, that was the closest we could get to the Seattle area. So we only had a 47 miles to go (Rochester is the "town" we are camped in). Although we considered driving back up to Mt. St. Helens this morning, we weren't sure that the top of the mountain was visible, so we decided against that. We got on the road about 9:30, stopped at a truck stop when we got back to I-5 to finish airing up the tires, and arrived at our campground about 11:00 a.m. Then we started calling for our next campground, which was just as difficult as this one had been. Collins and Marilyn had already made several calls by the time we got involved, but we finally found one that could take us next week, north of Seattle, so then we began our touring. Collins and Marilyn drove into Olympia to visit the Capitol Building.
Joe and I drove on further, to Tacoma to go to the Museum of Glass. In addition to an excellent gallery of glass artwork, there was a film where the artists talked about themselves and their art, and a "hot shop" where they were actually working with and blowing the molten glass. This was fascinating, Joe probably watched them for 1 1/2 hours. I stepped out to check out the gift shop (very expensive pieces!) then went back and watched them some more.
We left our artists and walked through the very impressive gallery.
The artwork was divided into sections, the first was "sea," and the next was "jewelry." These were some of my favorite pieces.
There were also "collections," some dated back to the early 1900s, some were donated by families or the artists.
This building is right on the harbor so we saw several boats moored here. This section of Tacoma is called the "Dome" section, and the hot shot had a sort-of dome top to let the heat escape.
One of the artists on the film had created this blue dome artwork.
Back to the hot shop, we watched them continue working on this piece.
They even had glass art as soap dishes in the restroom.
Along the hall to the restroom were other displays of glass art. Grandpa thought Andrew would like this one, named "Blinky the Crab."
One interesting thing we learned is that they have kids submit their own artwork, and they select one each month and create a piece of glass artwork out of the kid's design. They make 2 sets, one to give to the kid, and one for the museum. A neat way to support budding artists.
They practically kicked us out when they closed at 5:00, so we looked over the harbor again.
There were 3 musical instruments set up on this balcony, for anyone to play. Obviously, anyone!
So we of course got stuck in 5:00 traffic, which was crawling. It took over an hour to get from Tacoma to Olympia which is about 30 miles. Once we cleared Olympia, we got back up to speed and made it back to the campground, stopping for pizza at our exit.
Then we thought we should continue with our planning ahead and try to get our ferry booked to Vancouver, and a campground on the mainland side for the night before. Well, this was a new set of problems. There are usually 5 ferries that run the route of Anacortes, Washington to Sidney, B.C. Because of a generator failure on one of the ferries, they are down to four, and are not taking any new reservations at the present time. So we have our campground booked for north of Seattle, which is on the way to Anacortes, but nothing in place for the next phase. Had we not booked that campground already, we could probably cross at Port Angeles, south of Seattle. Problems, problems.
Tomorrow we plan to drive to Mr. Rainier, and the Brundiges plan to tour the LeMay "America's Car Museum," the "largest automotive museum in North America." We shall reconvene at the end of the day.
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