On Monday, the RV Rental company called and let us know that the RV would not be ready until 2pm. This changed our plans a bit since we were planning on picking it up at 8:30am. We are generally flexible vacationers, so this didn't bother us too much. Alissa and I let Justin and Elizabeth sleep in and recover from their jet lag while we went for a bike ride. We ended up renting mountain bikes for the trip from Recycled Cycles. The bikes are not great, but are certainly better than what the RV was offering for the same price, and our family would not function well without access to bikes.
For our bike ride, we decided to head out to Dash Point State Park. It was about 9 miles from our hotel, so about 20 miles on mountain bikes would be a decent ride for Alissa and me. The first 3 miles were on city streets in an industrial area, and Seattle is not as bike friendly as Maine. Many large trucks and honking motorists made for a stressful start. I don't know what they expected us to do...maybe people ride on the sidewalks here, but glass and industrial debris made this a daunting path even for mountain bike tires.
After the city streets the road mellowed to "Shoreline Drive". This was a nice road that followed the shoreline of Elliot Bay. This also meant that our ride was mostly flat. The final 3 miles to Dash Point State Park was up and over a large bluff. The view from the top was pretty, albeit rather industrial. They still store logs in large pens in the bay. It is always surprising to know that seemingly obsolete practices are still being used in urban settings.
Dash Point State Park was a typical beach park with some hokey camping area and a parking area near the beach. June in Seattle is not exactly beach weather, so Alissa and I had the beach to ourselves except for a professional beach comber with a metal detector. We locked the bikes up, took of our sneakers, and went for a walk on the low tide beach. We never figured out whether the tide was coming in or out, but given the distance from the beach head to the water it must have been about as low as it goes.
The Pacific is rather cold, but we were determined to find a sand dollar for each of the kids. We initially found a couple of "Sand Pennys" which were about the size of my pinky nail....but until we found something different, these were going to have to suffice. Alissa and I noticed that the sand pennies were especially fragile, and most of them broke apart just from our attempt to pick them up from the sand. We speculated about different species or environmental reasons for the weaker shells, but came to no solid conclusions. We were about to give up our hunt when Alissa finally found a true Sand Dollar, about 2-3 inches in size. A minute or two later we found another, similar size one, and couldn't believe our luck. The third one seconds later made us suspicious, but we didn't realize what we had truly found until we stood up and realized where we were. Alissa and I had found Fort Knox of the Sand Dollar collections. There were thousands of them, all piled upon each other. Some were semi-buried in the sand which led us to ponder what live sand dollars actually looked like and how/where they lived. We decided that the furry ones were alive and should be left alone.
We selected three obviously dead ones and packed those and the original sand pennies into a small bags of beach sand and headed back. After we returned to our hotel and had a chance to shower, we started to realize that these particular sand dollars smelled awful. It wasn't completely obvious while we on the beach, but it seems that Seattle hasn't completely worked out its sewage problem that they mentioned from the early 1900's in yesterday's tour. After several washings, the sand dollars seem to be passable, but they probably won't make the cut in our final selection of what returns with us from this trip.Mike (Dad)
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