On the Road with T and S

  We left Everett on Sunday morning and headed south to Seattle, our final stop on this trip. We drove to our hotel and dropped off our cases before we headed to SeaTac to return our car.  After the brief stop at the hotel we drove to Kubota Garden, a 20-acre Japanese garden in one of Seattle’s southern neighbourhoods. It was started in 1927 by Fijitaro Kubota, a Japanese immigrant. It is an urban oasis  with Japanese and native trees and plants, ponds and waterfalls. It was beautiful with its fall colours.  The following morning we headed down to the waterfront to the historic Pike Place Market where Starbucks first opened its doors to the public in 1971.  Then we wandered through the market which opened in 1907 and strolled by the numerous stalls of seafood, fresh produce, crafts and flowers.  On Tuesday we took the monorail, which was the first commercial monorail in the USA and built in 1962 as an attraction for the 1962 World’s Fair. It still uses the original cars.  The monorail

  We left Long Beach, WA on Saturday morning and drove north along the coast to Grayland, WA. We stopped briefly in the small fishing town of South Bend where the world’s largest oyster was caught! Here is a photo of it - if you can believe it!!! Then we continued on to Grayland where their annual cranberry harvest festival was taking place. The area around Grayland is home to a multi-million dollar cranberry industry. Over a hundred years ago, farmers identified that the confluence of ocean sprays and marshy land would be perfect for cultivating cranberries.  Most of the berries were harvested at this stage but we did see some of the cranberry bogs.  We also stopped at a pumpkin patch where locals were buying pumpkins to decorate their houses for Halloween.  Then we drove to Westport for the night and on to Olympia the following morning. On our way, we stopped and visited Millersylvania State Park where we went for a lovely walk in the forest.  Olympia is the state capital but it does