Five-Oh

As a rule, I prefer to not be in town for my birthday. Such a guideline usually results in mild adventures where I am dealing with new opportunities and experiences as opposed to hanging about the house (or worse yet, the office) and realizing that I am made of mere mortal clay.

So this year the Lovely Bride and I bundled our way down to the Alderbrook Resort, situated at the bottom of the backwards "J" of the Hood Canal (really a fjord, but you knew that, right?). Nice place, nice rooms, firm beds, killer view across the Canal at the Olympic Range. Pricey, but the advantage of birthdays is that you can declare "I'm worth it" and few will quibble with you.

The clientèle of the Alderbrook is the established wealthy (those with access to helicopters, seaplanes, and/or yachts), loud golf outings, families with one or two well-behaved children, and people who liked to read on the various patios by the fire pits. The Lovely Bride and I fit into that last group, as I was continuing my quest through Tom Pynchon's Against the Day and the LB for her part engaged with Bill Gibson's Pattern Recognition. After PAX and the various deadlines, it was a break I truly needed.

Excellent massage as well. The spa's front desk is a bit of a battleground (if you're doing a resort, note that the spa is usually a different operation, and communications between the two are not always ideal) but the hot stone massage was bone-dripping wonderful. It left me a little dazed, which was solved with another hour or so out by the fire pit with the Pynchon.

As a hike, the LB and I took on the Big Creek trail west of Hoodsport, which, like many trails in the Olympics, consisted of a great amount of "up" followed by an equal if not larger amount of "down". My feet were rock-solid swollen after that, requiring the hot tub and resort pool (which is, as its setting would demand, Olympic in nature).

The downside was the resort restaurant, which was merely average, and as such not worth its price. We had several meals there, and with the exception of a shellfish appetizer, nothing stood out. The fish had been thawed and refrozen at least once, the rare lamb was cooked medium, the medium steak was cooked to only medium rare, the sauces were heavy, turgid things, and the breakfast menu was off-putting with its audaciousness (cappuccino-favored french toast - yaknow, I'll just have an omlette). The restaurant was out of tune with the rest of the resort - it was too pretentious for casual dining, but its customers were the shorts and sandal crowd. Service, however, was good (though at one meal we were left to pour our own wine - oh, the horror).

Today held only a small disappointment as we had planned to raid the Quilicene beach for manilas, only to find that the beach had been closed to clamming ("Honey, did you notice this big red sign saying "Emergency Closure" before?"). And after talking myself hoarse at PAX and subjecting myself to the risks of massage, swimming, and healthy exercise, I finally came down with the Lovely Bride's headcold, so I napped in the car as she drove, and am spending the evening napping and moving between the rooms, honking and sniffling, and feeling pretty darn mortal.

But, since it is no longer officially my birthday, that's OK. On to 51!

More later,

When the Going Gets Tough ...

... the Tough go Clamming.

Yep, clamming. I've spent the past two days out on the Hood Canal (which is not a canal, but rather a fjord, but never mind), engaged in clamming.

It was a rest well-needed. We've been a little spotty on the postings of late, mainly because the workload has been a bit intense recently. Both the day-job and the freelance job are at critical junctures which need a lot of immediate attention to make sure everything works. As a result, there has been precious little time for anything else in my life.

But not for the past couple days. I took Friday off in my first vacation that did not involve bringing along a computer in over a year, and the Lovely Bride and I bundled into the hybrid, crossed to Bainbridge on the ferry (part-way escorted by Coast Guard craft with machine guns on the bows), crossed Bremerton Peninsula, across the Hood Canal Bride and down the other side to the beaches at Quilcene and Dosewallips.

Friday Quilcene was mostly empty, and it is a rich beach for manila steamers. Pick a spot, dig down an couple inches, and you come up with a handful. Saturday, when the low tide hit around noon, it was a zoo - everyone was clamming, including a lot of first-timers (you can tell they're first-timers - I'm giving clamming advice).

Doswallips was where the geoduck hunters hung out. We went there for horse clams, but were not successful (of course, our strategy was 'dig in a random location and hope for the best'). The geoduck hunters here are akin the deer hunters back in Wisconsin - good old boys that are heavily kitted out, packing post-hole-diggers as opposed to rifles, and clamming buckets with padded lids that can double as camp seats.

Civilization, such at it is on the canal, is clutched tight to the seashore, along a thing band between the high tide line and the National Forest. We ended up walking a lot in the national forest, down Falls Creek Canyon and into the murky wilds around Murhut Falls. They were strange hikes - beautiful, but oddly silent. I don't know if it because of the habitat, the season, or the recently-reported plummeting of bird populations, but the woods were strangely silent with only the occasional call.

But the clamming worked out (at least as far as the manilas). We're allowed to pull off 40 clams per person per day, so that means I have had around 80 clams over the weekend. The first batch we steamed over a primitive propane stove. The second batch made it home and were thrown into the pasta.

But I'm all clammed up for the moment, and ready to go back into the fray.

More later,