Wednesday August 31st

Heading back North today, via Seattle where we plan to stop off to visit the tower and go on a coash tour. To start with however we're visiting a local sand sculpture competition a couple of miles down the road. The signage wasn't terribly good but we eventually located in in a car parking lot off the backstreets of the local town. We were evidently early as there was almost nodody else around.

A deserted car park, this did not look promising.

However upon entering the quality and scale of the sculptures blew us away, yes they were just all sitting on tarmac in rows, not a very photogenic background, but it did make it easy to get around.

Sand castles galore

There were two classes; single person and two people. With two people you got twice as much sand and the same amount of time to complete it (2 days I think). They start by putting the sand into boxes and stamping it down to create a base before beginning the carving

Death and his dragon

How the heart really works

Heading on up to Seattle took an hour or so and we drove in lots of multi-occupancy lanes but they didn't seem to go any faster. We came in through the docks and ended up driving along the sea side where we'd been walking the previous day.

Our plan was to stop at the tower then catch the tour bus which should have been close by. Car parking was a problem however, we found one close by but having parked and got out we found it was an all day car park; we only wanted a couple of hours so I took a couple of quick photos and drove stright out again.

Driving around the block a couple of time we only found places that were illegal for one reason or another before finding ourselves on the main route out of town and nowhere to turn. Being fed up at this point we simply kept heading on out towads Canada. Seattle lost us as visistors.

Stopping in a small centre I picked up a new pair of shoes and we bought a coffee to drink in the boiling sun.

Having failed to see Mount Rainier yesterday we then thought we'd head inland to see if we could see Mount Baker. Turning off the I5 we found ourselves almost immediately in the backwoods of Washington State. Our map told us there were towns ahead but when we got there we really didn't feel like stopping for lunch, you had the feeling like you were in the wrong place. I've seen too many films of what happens in the backwoods.

The woods were fairly close for most of the way and we only occasionally saw sight of the river we were tracking. Turning North and then looping back West we drove through a town called Concrete which about sums up our feelings for the place.

Back on the I5 we felt we'd returned to civilisation, the border to Canada was much less traumatic than coming the other way. The only hang up was that mum needed to keep the US Visa for her next visit but as the border guard had already ripped it out it didn't get stapled back in and was subsequently lost, this caused many problems on her return trip in November.

Space Needle

Dark Angel is up

there somewhere