Posts In The “Destinations” Category
The city of Everett, about 30 miles (48km) north of Seattle, evolved and prospered through transportation. The 1893 arrival of the Great Northern Railway transformed the small lumber town into a major lumber center that supported several large sawmills, including the self-proclaimed largest shingle mill in the world. Access to new timberland and other resources…
The Puget Sound port city of Tacoma was founded in 1872 and experienced what author Rudyard Kipling described as “a boom of the boomiest” when the following year it was selected as the Pacific Northwest terminus of the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railway. After a brief downturn during the Panic of 1893, the city bounced back…
Bainbridge Island, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, has had a robust Japanese community since immigrants first arrived there in the late 1800s. Their world was shattered following the air attack on Pearl Harbor, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order for the nation-wide internment of over 125,000 US residents of Japanese descent,…
Alderbrook Resort on Hood Canal has been a popular Pacific Northwest vacation destination since it first opened in 1913. Back then, no roads reached the resort and guests arrived by canoe. The resort has been through many owners and remodels since opening, and now is easily reachable by road on Washington State Route 106. But…
The historic Point Ruston ferry was built in Maine in 1936, and initially served as the navy ferry Aquidneck YFB-14 between Newport RI and Goat Island. The Pierce County Ferry System purchased the ship from the navy in 1971, and ran it as the M/V Steilacoom on the route between its namesake city and Anderson…
On a rare weekend actually spent at home in Seattle, we managed to watch three live hockey games over four days. Two were Seattle Kraken NHL games, and the third was an infrequent return to Seattle by the Thunderbirds Junior A team for the “Battle of the Sound” against the Portland Winterhaks. We often attended…
Marina del Rey, in Los Angeles County, California, contains the largest artificial pleasure boat harbor in North America. Construction began in the 1950s and today the basin has a capacity for 5,000 vessels, supports five different yacht clubs and is lined with restaurants, shops, condos, and hotels. The first hotel built was the historic Marina…
We traveled a lot this winter, both near and far. The first, and most major, trip was an unforgettable journey over New Year’s to Antarctica, where we flew on a DC-3 to stand at the geographic South Pole at altitude 9,301 ft (2,835m). As part of this adventure, we also made stops in dynamic Doha,…
Completed in September, 2023 at a cost of $2.3 billion, the Sphere in Las Vegas is 366 feet (111 m) tall and 516 feet (157 m) wide. The exterior is covered with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LED lights that are programmed with an ever-changing array of spectacular images. The interior features a 16K 160,000-square-foot (15,000…
We’ve been toying with the idea of a high-speed weekend boat to more easily take advantage of the water-based attractions in the area, so made that our focus at this year’s Seattle Boat Show. Brands that we toured include Arksen, Axopar, Coastal Craft, and Saxdor. Wellcraft also is of interest, but they weren’t represented at…
Despite all our travels, Jennifer had never been to Mexico and James had only briefly visited once, years ago for a conference in Cancun. Jennifer finally reached America’s neighbor to the south early this year on a fabulous weekend trip to Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. James started…
Gig Harbor is a wonderfully sheltered and tranquil harbor on the opposite side of the Puget Sound from Tacoma. We’ve spent many nights anchored there on Dirona, enjoying the lights reflecting into the still waters from the homes and businesses that ring the shore. And we always made a point to take the tender ashore…
We enjoyed our first weekend at Point Ruston so much that we returned for another earlier this year. We love the rooms at the Point Ruston Waterfront hotel, with sweeping views to Commencement Bay, where we can get a little work done by the window and see what’s happening outside, both on land and the…
As part of our trip to the South Pole, we returned to Cape Town for the first time since 2015. Back then, we’d arrived in South Africa from Reunion after crossing the Indian Ocean in Dirona, and spent two months in country before sailing on to Barbados via St. Helena. As our plane banked over…
For the first half of the 20th century, the only people who had stood at the South Pole were the 1911/1912 expedition teams of Norwegian Roald Amundsen and Briton Robert F. Scott. It wasn’t until 1956 that humans again set foot at the pole, this time to establish the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station research center…
We first visited Antarctica aboard the National Geographic Endurance in late 2022 and loved the raw beauty of the snow-covered wilderness, with fantastically-shaped icebergs and rugged mountains soaring upwards from land and sea. The wildlife was exceptional as well, but it was the scenery that really drew us in. We knew we’d be back, but…
World-famous Kruger National Park is one of the largest game reserves on the African continent, encompassing nearly 4.9 million acres (2 million ha). The park also is home to among the widest diversity of large mammals in the world, including the lion, leopard, cheetah, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, antelope, and wildebeest. We very…
Doha, the capitol of oil-rich Qatar, is a fast-growing and dynamic city with a spectacular, constantly-evolving skyline. The Qatari government, in an effort to diversify the economy away from oil and gas sector and encourage tourism and business investments, is investing heavily in world-class infrastructure and modernization. The country has burst onto the world stage…