I’ve added a new photo gallery, Olympiad. It covers the part of our big late May trip from when we left Seattle on the ferry, so we could have lunch in Winslow with my friend Christine before driving up and around the corner to Port Angeles. It’s also got some of the first full day we drove around the edges of Olympic National Park, and some coastal stuff. There are a lot more photos to add in the next albums, which will cover a day trip to Victoria, some hiking near Hurricane Ridge, and a bit of the Hoh Rain Forest. Finally ends up with a couple of days spent at Mt. Rainier.

This time, we were determined not to get lost on the way to the ferry, as we’d had some problems getting there (my fault, the human navigator should never override Fred, the female-voiced portable nav system (she’s named after the Buffy character, and also it’s a Magellan…).

Then after a fabulous lunch catching up with Christine (with the oddity of finding neo-Nazi graffiti in the women’s room at the restaurant), we drove on up to Port Angeles, where my husband David and I stayed for 4 days.

I didn’t really take a lot of pictures in P.A., but it was a pleasant town, right on the water, and the hotel was steps from the Black Ball ferry landing for a Victoria excursion. We drove out of town the next full day meaning to drive around Crescent Lake and get up into parts of Olympic National Park, but we became accidental tourists of a sort… we arrived at the scene of a serious accident just seconds after it happened. I thought I already blogged about this before, but the photos are there in the gallery in between random shots of flowers and the lake. Then there’s the garish emergency colors of orange and red and yellow, and then there’s mossy rocks and windswept coastlines. Everyone survived, but it was scary at first, since we and the people in the other cars in both directions were it as far as first aid and comfort until the pros got there. The worst injury was a broken leg for the passenger in the blue car. It could have been so, so much worse, and of course we didn’t know how bad it was until they finally cut him out.

After the accident we turned aside from our previous vague idea of driving to the ocean coast side of the Peninsula and dawdled along on the Strait of Juan de Fuca side, stopping at viewpoints to photograph trees, beaches, and the occasional eagle. It made for a relaxing day, but the accident cut 2 hours out of the middle of it. We ended up at the tippy-tippiest point on the northwest corner of Washington, at a beautiful cliff-bound spot that was on Makah Indian land. That was a pretty good day.

I’ve added some more images from last week’s trip to my gallery and now that takes us up through the end of the festival weekend. The actual festive activities start with this photo; I took a bunch of pictures of the mostly-inactive revamped fountain before there were actually people at the site.

This time I tried to take more images of people and interesting things rather than just pictures of static performances.

Take a one man band, a bunch of guys in Utilikilts, some dancing girls, some singing groups, and an incredible array of fascinating characters and long-lost friends, and you have Folk Life.