Thursday, August 16, 2018

Put another pin in the map

I decided to drive out to Cape Flattery, billed as the northwest corner of Washington. It would be the third corner of the contiguous states I’ve been to. Key West FL and Imperial Beach CA were the other two. I’ve also been to Blaine WA, which is farther north than Cape Flattery. And I’ve been a few miles from the southern tip of Texas. I doubt I’ll ever go to the far corner of Maine or that little blip at the top of Minnesota.

Wave to the Canadians out there somewhere

The road to Cape Flattery follows the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. (That’s fun to say. Juan de Fuca... Juan de Fuca...) Vancouver Island is across the way ten to eighteen miles. At least that’s what my geography lessons taught me. I couldn’t see it through the fog. Maybe only a ghost of it.

I was surprised, then not surprised to pass a Border Patrol truck. Oh, of course, they need to be on the watch for “fishermen” sneaking in.

When I got to Neah Bay I could see even thicker fog curling over and around the mountain that forms the cape. Should I make the fifteen mile round trip to the point only to see more fog, just so I can say I’d been there? Mmmmm, no. Close enough. Make your own joke about flattery and getting nowhere.

2 comments:

  1. You found the lava tree! We were there Aug 2013, driving a car with manual transmission. It was exhausting. "When a liquid lava flow invades a forest, often, the lava does not overthrow the larger trees, but flows around their trunks. At the very contact of the hot lava to the bark, a thin layer of the lava is quenched sufficiently to form an isolating coating around the trunk. The tree itself most often burns down slowly, eventually falling down onto the lava."

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  2. There don't appear to be any towns in that little blip in northern MN, but now you have my curiosity up, and I'm going to have to maybe check that blip out.

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