Washington - Day 7 - to and around Olympia

Millersylvania State Park, Olympia

Tuesday, 7 June 2022

today's route

I managed to get an appointment for a Covid shot at a Walgreen's in Olympia for 11:30.  Google said today's drive would take just over an hour so, to leave room for error, I left last night's campground just after 8:00.

I got thanked twice today for pulling over, which gave me a good impression of WA's drivers.

I passed a Christmas tree farm, the Bay City Oysters, a variety of businesses in Aberdeen, and crossed a lot of unnamed rivers (or just rivers without signs).  

I passed several signs that read: "STOP Wild Olympics Land Grab" and "Jobs Killer."  Clearly someone was impassioned about something, which I was hoping didn't have anything to do with the Olympic Games but instead with the Olympic Peninsula, so I looked it up.

This is the website I found:   https://www.workingwildolympics.org  I was right about the impassioned part.  From the typos and grammatical errors I deduced that this was a stream-of-consciousness description of their platform that they indeed felt very strongly about.  And for a "fair and balanced" perspective, here's the page for the other side:   http://www.wildolympics.org  I know nothing about this issue besides what I read on these pages, and my opinion comes only in a tangential way.

For years I lived next to the Tongass National Forest, in Juneau, AK, and saw how the US Forest Service managed it (let the timber companies cut down all the ancient old-growth forest because they pay the federal government an honorarium for the privilege).  That experience taught me that protecting relatively untouched natural lands, rather than "managing" them, creates hardships in the short term but greater benefits in the long term.  I also learned that an entirely new industry (tourism) can provide enormous economic benefits to replace what the old industries lose access to.  For those who are loggers not only by profession but by preference, they aren't interested in learning new skills.  This is the dilemma being faced lately by coal miners.  And I have a lot of sympathy for the emotional wrench and upheaval something like this causes in their lives.  But I still think there are too many people on our planet and we're all needing to make some hard choices.

In Olympia, I'd found Yauger Park on Google's map of the town and remembered the name, so I aimed for there to give Dext a walk.  When I lived here (14 years ago), I drove on these roads almost every day for 10 years.  And I found 14 years is a really long time and I no longer remembered much of anything.

Partly I think that's because the trees grew so much in those years that they changed the whole view.  And partly it was because everywhere the grass was too tall and the bushes needed pruning - and I realized they'd had so much rain they probably hadn't had a chance to get these things done.  All over town I saw and heard lawn mowers trying frantically to get grass cut before the rain forecast in the next couple of days.

I got my booster (they let me in early) and feel reassured, even though she said it wouldn't be fully effective for 2 weeks.  I stopped at a Batteries + Bulbs to replace batteries for gadgets I had that I couldn't find refills for at grocery stores.  I stopped at the AAA office to get an Olympia map so I could try to figure out where things are and fill in the gaps in my memory.  I stopped at a Ford repair center to see about a new headlight, and they gave me an appointment for tomorrow morning.  And on the way to tonight's campground I stopped at Pioneer Park in Lacey - another name I remembered but a place I didn't recognize.  Dext got a good walk and I felt a little like Alice in Looking Glass Land - everything was familiar but nothing was familiar.