The Dilettante Traveler: May 2013

This year is all about local travel . . . when it's about travel at all. In mid-April Ian, Spackle and I had a blustery, April-weather-temperamental weekend in Port Townsend, where we meandered around Fort Worden and enjoyed doing NO WORK ON THE HOUSE for a couple days.

Lower Bunker at Fort Worden. One of the really cool things about this park is that the bunkers are presented in a very non-American way--that is, there are no added guard rails, there are no lights, virtually nothing has been rebuilt, and there are miles of narrow, pitch-black tunnels to grope breathlessly through. They are concrete, too, and very echoey, and some of the metal doors still move, and can be banged shut, which adds to the utterly terrifying experience of the tunnel-wanderers. If you want to fall off of concrete onto concrete, that's your problem. If you want to scrape your nose on a wall because you couldn't see that your tunnel was turning, that's your problem. It's really fun!

Ian and Spackle on Lower Bunker

Guess who tends to illegally harvest seaweed.

Lighthouse on the peninsula. Automated in the 70's.

Tide and wind rips--very glad to be on shore!

Artistic shot of windy trees and abandoned military structure.

Rainbow!

Hillside spring colors.

Commercial harbor, across the street from the aptly named Harborside Inn where we stayed with Spackle (who loves a hotel).

Sailboats.

Spackle, basking in the hotel.

Glorious blue sky on Saturday!

Interesting rusty bits.

Woodpecker.

Upper bunkers.

Nature resuming control.

Lots of shipping and spectacular skies.

The lighthouse from above.

Can it, now.

Spackle was quite the capable hiker, but did need to take a break for a bit of a lie-flat.

and some back-scratching writhing.

Pretty doggy.

The tunnel to Heaven. When I was in high school, lo these many years ago, and spent a week at Ft Worden for an arts camp, we went through this tunnel and, from the field up above, were able to climb down an old, rusting ladder in a crumbling shaft, and into a decommissioned cistern. The cistern was perfectly round with eerie acoustics, entirely unlit aside from the ladder shaft, and freaky as hell. It was AWESOME. It is now completely closed off, its entrances welded shut.