seattle – Page 2 – Sheila365

And poof … 5 years gone by.

Sunday was the 5 year blogoversary for sheila365! I meant to draft a post ahead of time, and post it bright and early on March 8th. But I just looked at the calendar and time has snuck by on me once again.

That’s ok. In these 5 years sheila365 has evolved, and I think I have a bit, too. My blog started as a post-a-day 365 project during the first year or two, which had me snapping photos during the day to make sure I had something that I judged “share-worthy;” and now it has become more of a leisurely, post-every-week-or-so project, which I have to say has been much easier, though less artistic in terms of trying to capture beautiful photos, but rather just moments from my day that struck me as special or interesting in one way or another.

So happy blogoversary to me! 🙂 I thought I’d go back through my posts from year 5 and pick a photo from one post from each month that especially makes me smile. I have to say it was very hard to pick just one picutre from each month.

March 2014: Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. A visit to the walled El Morro. Beautiful Caribbean views.

April 2014: British Virgin Islands sailing trip – this was taken while snorkeling off Cooper Island.

Turtle dude surfacing - 2 — Turtle dude surfacing – 2

May 2014 – A trip home to Seattle. One of several last year. It is a beautiful, special place for me.

June 2014 – Back in Austin for fun on the lake with some of my crazy sailor friends.

July 2014 – An amazing trip to Panama City Beach to celebrate a very special anniversary with a very special family.

August 2014 – A roadtrip to the Texas Gulf Coast. One of my favorite places to relax.

September 2014 – A lovely anniversary trip through the Texas Wine Country.

October 2014 – A fun girls’ trip to Washington, D.C. Lots of laughs, lots of wine, and lots of walking. 🙂

The residential streets are lined with historic townhouses.

November 2014 – An oh so special birthday.

December 2014 – Family visiting means showing off Austin and the Hill Country. Never gets old.

January 2015 – Hiking as many trails as I can before I had to go back to work after taking a few months off.

February 2015 – Yep, more tulips.

What an amazing lap around the sun!

Thanks for coming along for the ride. 🙂

A great day.

Today Mom and I headed to Seattle Center to see the amazing Chihuly Garden and Glass museum. Fran, Aaron and Colleen joined us. It was an amazingly clear, sunny day. We also went up in the Space Needle to see the 360 degree view. I took too many pictures to share here, but will leave you with a few.

A few more pics from Seattle.

In the summer, sunset seems to linger for a very long time in Seattle. This is a shot I took from the ferry on the way home from the game. It must have been about 9:30pm. In this wide panorama you can still see the glow of the sun past the horizon on the left…the city lights including the space needle, the great wheel, and both century link and safeco stadium…and the rising supermoon on the right.

I’ve gotten tired of trying to guess which side of Mt Rainier we’ll fly by on my return flights to Austin. So, I just kept the seat that I was assigned – window on the left side. I got lucky this time and we flew north-to-south past the western face of this great mountain, turning to the southeast as we passed it.

The haze nestled amongst the surrounding foothills is smoke from the ongoing fires in Central Washington. A couple of factoids: Mt Rainier is a volcano; elevation of 14,410′; last recorded eruption was in the 1st half of the 1800’s; home to 26 major glaciers and many ice fields; 6 rivers have glaciers on Mt Rainier as their source. Read more here.

We flew very close to the summit. In this shot of the western face, you can see Sunset Amphitheater on the left and Tahoma Glacier on the right. The black ring on the top right of the dome is the volcanic crater. The summit, Columbia Crest is along that black ring.

Breathtaking.

Sweet Lou.

I went to the Mariners game tonight with Fran and Art. They were inducting their former manager, Lou Pinella, into the Mariners hall of fame – a big deal for the team and fans.
I collected my Lou bobble head.

And got some awesome shots at sunset from the waterfront.

Special place.

I love the Seattle waterfront. On Thursday Mom and I joined Fran, Aaron, Rebecca, Colleen and Jake for the afternoon. Took a ferry ride, rode the Great Wheel, found a few geocaches along the way, ate lunch, and took in another beautiful, sunny, Seattle day.

And….again!

Oh so pretty. I didn’t have a window seat today. It’s just as well, though, because I would have been hogging/blocking the view the whole time. 🙂
So I asked my seat-neighbor to snap one for me, instead.

A look through the window, on my way home.

I’m headed home today, after a nice, long visit in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll share a few of the sights I took in along the way…

Roadsters on the way to the airport:

On the plane I chose a starboard window seat, expecting the normal fly by with Mount Rainier on my right. It turns out we flew south of Mount Rainier, so instead I had a view of its neighboring Cascade peaks Mount Adams (in the foreground) and Mount Hood (beyond and to the left).

The Columbia River gorge, with the Miller Island to the left, where the Deschutes River joins the Columbia, and beyond it, the Dalles, and then Mt Hood in the distance.

It rained a bit while I’ve been gone, and I could see the 630.5′ high Lake Travis through the steamy haze.

We flew over my neighborhood, and I got a shot of our house! Funny.

And Big Blue’s Austin offices… quickly being swallowed up by the Domain and other new development. Looks like noone works weekends anymore.

Home sweet home.

Paddling around.

My mom’s sister is here visting, another is arriving this week. Today they’re spending the morning together catching up. So, I headed out to go kayaking near Hood Canal with Noreen, her friend Tammy and her son, Matt. I think I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but it was a BEAUTIFUL day. The water was flat and calm, and the tide wasn’t fighting us too badly.

My front row seat:

This area is full of bald eagles. Here’s a pair that were watching us as we went by:

And yes, the obligatory panorama 🙂

Is it August yet?

Seen in the North satellite terminal at SeaTac airport. Go Hawks!

Checking out the Falls.

Today I had the chance to go for a small road trip. Just a 90 minute drive, each way, up to Snoqualmie Falls. I went for it. I packed mom along with me, with her wheel chair for maximum ease of checking out each nook and cranny of this naturally beautiful place. And we were off…headed east to visit one of the most popular scenic places in Washington State. It turned out that Noreen and David were coming west over the pass from Eastern Washington from a wedding, and we were able to time it so that we met for lunch at the beautiful Salish Lodge at the falls. The flow was high, due to snow melt… swelling the falls to a thunderous level. You could feel the water falling, you could hear it beating the rocks below, and you could feel the spray 300′ up from the bottom.

I can’t tell you how pretty it was, so i’ll just share 2 shots:

and a panorama:

An awesomely beautiful day.

A few scenes from Sunday.

Today Monte and I headed to Seattle with Fran, and met Colleen. We took our time making it from the waterfront to Safeco field to watch a Sunday afternoon Mariner’s game. Another fun day with a few of my sistahs. Here are just a few moments from the day…

Play ball! Thanks for the seats, Harlan.

Saturday!

I spent the night at Noreen’s last night. This morning, she finished another glass window / work of art. This one is for her own house. She does beautiful work!

Then I toodled back over to mom’s. This afternoon, I introduced her to geo-caching, and she enjoyed it. We found 3 out of 4 “park and grab” caches that we searched for on the way to the Harbor Fest downtown. She stayed in the car and pointed me to where the GPS said to look, and then we opened up the cache’s together in the car.

Then we headed downtown to take in the Harbor Fest. This is a shot of the boardwalk downtown along the waterfront.

Then, later, I headed for the airport to pick up my sweetie, who is joining me here for the last week of the month. It was fitting that my favorite mountain was poking above every horizon on my drive to the airport tonight.

Playing through.

Fran and I enjoyed playing a round of golf this evening. Awesome!

This family of ducks wandered through one of the holes.

And we caught a glimpse of Mount Rainier looking back from the tee at 18.

It was a beautiful day for golf among the Christmas trees.

Good day.

Today was a pretty full day. The weather was supposed to be colder and drizzly, but it turned out to be another lovely day with blue skies. Keep ’em coming.

Mom and I went to the Armed Forces Day parade, one of the oldest and longest in the country.

I squeezed in a little geo-caching during the afternoon, and then headed over to Seattle to meet my sisters and spent a few hours on the waterfront. We ducked into this little corner o’heaven to watch the Sounders game (win!).

And then caught the ferry home. Pretty views from the stern.

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